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

Program Description 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 with Data Science

An understanding of language enhances our self-awareness, inspiring us to address fundamental questions about our communication as 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.

This course will give students the unique skillset of using data science to tackle these topics by engaging with tools such as analysing large corpora of texts, conducting experiments, statistical analysis, and machine learning. It will allow students to develop their research and IT skills by collecting and analysing linguistic data using state-of-the-art technology, and a combination of team-work and independent projects will enhance their communication, problem-solving, and management skills.

At Essex, students will acquire a broad foundation in the study of language. Their diverse research looks at this uniquely human phenomenon from several angles: the structures that exist in the world’s languages, the variation in how people speak them, how humans process and understand language, and how languages are learned and best taught.