2.5-Term Pathway - Foundation Certificate in Social Sciences - Continue to Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - Linguistics (Placement Year)

For students who've finished high school but don’t meet the entry requirements for university, a Foundation Certificate can help them gain entry to an undergraduate degree. After completing this pathway option students qualify for progression to the 1st year of an undergraduate degree at the University of Essex.

A student’s course length is determined mainly by their English language level (UKVI IELTS score). Students on all course lengths take a set of common or similar modules to gain a solid base of skills for university. Students taking a course longer than 2 terms, will take additional modules designed to improve one or more of their English language level, academic skills, and basic knowledge of particular subjects.

Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - Linguistics

Linguists study questions to gain insight into what it means to “know a language”. An understanding of language enhances self-awareness, inspiring people to address fundamental questions about communication between human beings.

Linguistics is an increasingly important subject, impacting on areas in psychology, philosophy, education and artificial intelligence. It has real-world applications in such diverse fields as human rights, computer-assisted language learning, and the study of institutional language in settings like doctor-patient interactions, interviewer-interviewee dialogues, and courtroom exchanges.

The course offers students a solid grounding in linguistics, while still allowing for a large amount of personal choice. Students explore a wide range of core topics in linguistics, mastering key concepts in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

University of Essex is a leading UK university for language and linguistics research, a place where talented students become part of an academic community in which the majority of research is rated ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, placing them firmly within the top 10 departments in the UK. Students have an opportunity to study different kinds of linguistics from structural linguistics to applied and experimental linguistics.

Studying language and linguistics allows students to develop their research and IT skills by collecting and analyzing linguistic data using state-of-the-art technology, and a combination of team-work and independent projects enhances students' communication, problem-solving, and management skills.

Graduates have gone on to have careers in a wide variety of fields, including teaching, journalism, advertising, marketing, travel, communications, publishing, speech and language therapy, and business administration.