Welcome to English Language and Linguistics

Language is ‘the best show’ that humanity puts on, according to Benjamin Lee Whorf: the ability to use language is what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, and it’s a crucial part of our lives - at home, at school, at work and at play.

Queries such as ‘How do you pronounce that word?’ or ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’, or statements like ‘Those people can’t speak properly’ or ‘I didn’t learn grammar when I was a child’, indicate the range of ways that people think about or discuss language, even if they are not consciously studying it. When you add the particular importance that English serves in personal, local, national and international communication to the essential fascination that language has, you can see why the study of English Language is so dynamic and complex.

English Language Studies at UCLan is an interesting and innovative course, which – in offering several perspectives of the English language - meets the needs of a range of students. Among other things, the course enables students to develop analytical and descriptive skills in the core linguistic areas of phonetics, semantics and sentence analysis. Students are also introduced to another field related to meaning – that of pragmatics – and to (the study of) rhetoric, critical linguistic analysis, and linguistic analysis using corpus linguistic software.

At Level One*, English Language Studies students study the origins, historical development and dialectal variation(s) of English as well as stylistics. They also take a Level One module in English literature.
At Levels Two and Three* students can choose to specialise with a language-only route or continue to include up to 30% of literature in their programme.

The programme is therefore carefully designed to allow students to choose the necessary combination of English Language and Literature that is required for a career in teaching English at secondary school (and may be preferred for primary teachers, too).

Of course, other career options are also open to English Language students: indeed, a unique aspect of the English Language Studies course, here at UCLan, is its specially-designed suite of employability-related modules, known as ELSIE. These modules combine career development and employability with subject-based knowledge: indeed, in their second year, students engage in employability-related projects around the theme of communication at work (i.e. how communication works but also how we use communication in a work-based context); for more details of the ELSIE suite of programmes, see www.elsieproject.org.uk.

What is Linguistics?

Linguistics sets out to investigate all aspects of the nature and uses of language, as well as to explore some of the wider issues of communication in a cultural context. Since we use language from our earliest years to make sense of the world and other people, issues of language and communication seem to be fundamental to everything else we do.

Linguistics tries to answer questions such as:

• What is language and what tools do we need in order to describe it?
• How do we acquire language and why is second language learning so difficult?
• How and why is there such variety in the use of language?
• How does language function in relation to other modes of communication including visual media?

These and many other questions address both theoretical and practical issues, and our main aim is to enable our students to apply their knowledge in real situations by the time they graduate from this University.

The Linguistics team is proud of the fact that the subject was one of the first to be taught on degree programmes at UCLan. The considerable teaching and research experience accumulated by the subject team has resulted in a version of Linguistics that incorporates traditional or ‘core’ elements that would be considered essential in any scheme, alongside ones that are both distinctive and innovative in this Linguistics programme. We also seek to make relevant connections between traditional areas and communication issues. Indeed, our programme has been carefully designed so that students can experience the range and diversity of the subject, whilst also being able to pursue a special interest in greater depth. For this reason the introductory first year concentrates on developing practical skills in describing and analysing language and language use in order to provide the foundation for work in Years Two and Three.

After Year One, students can choose from a number of modules grouped under the following themes:

• Core linguistic studies of sounds, structure and meaning.
• Applied Linguistics, ranging from applied phonetics to language in education, literary and text studies, and computer-based text analysis.
• Language in its Social Context, including aspects of language variation, historical linguistics and conversation and discourse analysis.
• Language and Communication, including the relationship between language, image(s) and the media, power and ‘talk’, rhetoric, and language and gender.

Linguistics is an essential basis to careers such as speech therapy, translation and interpreting, and to the developing sphere of speech technology, involving speech recognition and synthesis. Thus, Linguistics is not only popular (approximately 100 students a year now choose to study Linguistics at Central Lancashire) but also an invaluable part of life and career development.