BA English Language and Chinese / Course details

Our BA English Language and Chinese course will enable you to investigate the sounds, words and grammar of the English language, and discover the origin of English, its development and variation across the UK and beyond, and how it is used in different situations. 

You will acquire the skills required for analytical language study alongside the means to apply those skills to the study of historical and present-day English. 

In addition, you will practise key transferable skills, such as essay writing and how to give a presentation. 

The course allows students to achieve near-native proficiency in Mandarin Chinese and to study the language within its cultural and historical context. 

You can start either as an absolute beginner or with up to A-level standard Chinese and go through to an advanced level over four years. 

Language study offers much more than just language fluency. 

You'll explore diverse aspects of the culture, society, history, politics and literature of the countries in which Chinese is spoken, helping you to develop intercultural awareness and communication skills - both highly valued by employers. 

You'll benefit from excellent teaching, student support and cutting-edge study facilities, as well as from the vibrancy and cultural diversity of Manchester itself, Western Europe's most multilingual city. 

With placement options available at partner universities and in professional environments in a Chinese-speaking country, a compulsory third year abroad gives our undergraduate students unforgettable and invaluable personal and professional experience.

The course unit details listed below are those you may choose to study as part of this programme and are referred to as optional units. These are subject to change and are the latest example of the curriculum available on this programme. Although language units may show here as optional, they are a mandatory part of your modern languages degree and you will take the units relevant to your level of language in each year of study. It is compulsory to study language at all levels of your modern languages degree.

Study or work abroad

Your year abroad will offer the opportunity to gain first-hand experience of life in a Chinese-speaking country and further develop your language skills.

Learn from language experts

Language courses are mainly taught by native speakers of each language, giving you a richer learning experience.

You'll have the opportunity to access cutting-edge resources, including one of the largest holdings of linguistics texts in the UK, and to conduct research using English manuscripts held in our prestigious Special Collections.

Get involved with interesting projects

Our students are encouraged to take an active role in funded teaching-enhancement projects, whose outputs benefit them individually and collectively.

For example, some of our students have developed an online atlas of dialect variation in the UK and storyboards for the use in fieldwork.

Benefit from links with the Chinese community

We have close links with the Confucius Institute , which fosters interaction between Manchester's large community of Chinese native speakers, our University students and representatives of the wider Chinese-speaking world.

You will learn through a mixture of formal lectures, seminars, and tutorials, spending approximately 12 hours a week in formal study sessions.

For every hour spent at university, you will be expected to complete a further two to three hours of independent study.

You will also need to study during the holiday periods.

The individual study component could be spent reading, producing written work, revising for examinations, or working in the University's Language Centre .

You will be assessed in various ways, including:

• written and oral examinations;
• presentations;
• coursework (which may include library research, linguistic fieldwork and data collection, or web-based research).

Many course units are assessed through a mixture of techniques.

In your final year, you can choose to write a dissertation.

As well as making use of the wider University library network, you will have access to the University Language Centre , a modern open learning facility where you can study independently and make use of a library and audio-visual resources.

There are also language laboratories and multimedia facilities.

For your English language studies, you will benefit from access to a wide range of technical facilities, online resources, and unique collections at the John Rylands Library.

Learn more on the facilities pages for  Linguistics and English Language  and  Modern Languages and Cultures .