The course is intended for students who wish to upgrade their professional and academic standing in critical discourse, cross-cultural communication and the media. It is particularly suitable for students/researchers who want to move into higher education, journalism, and research into the role of communication in media and society.
Programme content
You will study these modules:
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Critical Discourse Culture and Communication
This module covers aspects of how spoken and written discourse is organised, how it varies, and how it may be described and analysed. There is a strong focus on issues of culture and communication and on the critical interpretation of texts.
Choose from Describing Language; Introduction to Translation Research; Introduction to Lexicography, Introduction to Corpus Linguistics.
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Social and Multimodal Aspects of Communication
This module aims to provide an overview of the major issues in the area of Sociolinguistics and Multimodal Communication, with particular reference to new theories that takes into consideration a diversity of communicative modes – language, image, music, sound texture and gesture. The perspective taken in this course assumes that communication always happens in a social context and it is always multimodal. The first part of the course will discuss the main theoretical approaches to language placed in the social world. The second part will explore new ways of understanding and analysing multimodal communication.
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Research Methods in Applied Linguistics
This module includes a course in methods and approaches to research in Applied Linguistics. In addition, students select one option from the range on offer and apply what they have learned to a small research project.
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Intercultural Communication
The aim of this course is to provide an overview of the major issues in the area of Intercultural Communication, with particular reference to developments in the last 20 years. In today's global world, it is necessary to communicate successfully across cultural boundaries of languages, styles and values. This module will address these questions, using participants' cultural background as the basis for contrastive analysis in terms of language difference, pragmatics, social semiotics and visual communication.
You will also study one optional module:
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Bilingual Dictionaries and Terminology
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Business English
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Cognitive Linguistics and Language Learning
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Computer Assisted Language Learning
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Corpus Linguistics
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Discourse for Teachers
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English as a Global Language
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English for Specific/Academic Purposes
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Forensic Linguistics
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Genre Analysis
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Language and Literature
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Management of Innovation
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Media Literacy
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Teacher Training
Please note that availability of optional modules vary from year to year.
In addition to these modules you will complete a 12,000 word dissertation.
You will also take a short non-assessed course 'Introduction to the Bank of English', which introduces them to the 400 million word Bank of English Corpus, an invaluable collection of authentic language data for critical analysis against which theory, intuition and pedagogic materials can be measured.