Supervision and Support for Research Students

Female students in conversation Supervised Research students (and PhDNR) are allocated a supervisor (or supervisors) who advise on and monitor their research as it proceeds from the start. You will also get useful help from your Adviser. You also of course have access to consult any member of staff in the department who may be able to help you with some point. Because of the size of the department we have experts in almost anything you might need. E.g. a student working on a topic related to language teaching might sometimes need guidance on a pure linguistic issue; a student working primarily in theoretical phonology might yet gather some data from speakers and need help with statistics to analyse it. Research students may also attend (unassessed) any of our 80 or so open graduate modules, where they feel it might be useful as further support or training. Every year also the University hosts a Social Science Data Analysis and Collection summer school, where you are able to take advanced statistics or qualitative analysis courses if required.

Often a supervisor will have more than one research student working in the same area and individual supervision is complemented by group sessions, workshops and seminars. Every research student will join one or other of over ten research groups in the Department, in the relevant area (e.g. we have groups in areas such as ESP, Language and Dialect Contact, Conversation Analysis, Psycholinguistics, Vocabulary and Strategies, Cognitive Linguistics, SLA, Syntactic Theory, Constraint-based Linguistics, Language and Computation, African Diaspora Englishes). These groups meet regularly in term time and are opportunities for all sorts of support in a friendly environment. E.g. one week the group might all read a key article and discuss it; another week a student might talk informally about his/her research plan and get feedback from those further advanced in similar research; another week someone might present their findings, as a practice for presenting them at a conference. Students in the same group will often also help each other outside group meetings e.g. by sharing references they have found, or, where the research involves gathering open data from interviews or think aloud reports, by checking the reliability of each others’ codings of data.

We also provide an extensive programme of general academic support for research students. The Department has a special series of Professional Development sessions for research students. The Graduate School also runs a series of special sessions for research students (with topics such as How to survive the viva). We have a weekly Departmental Seminar featuring a distinguished outside speaker on some area of Linguistics that we cover: this is your chance to meet well known figures from outside Essex who've produced some of the leading publications in your field. Each year, we hold a number of Research Student Presentation Days including the Essex Graduate Conference in Linguistics, when research students have an opportunity to present their work in a conference-like situation. Some of these are purely internal, but we also hold annually our Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference, a postgraduate day conference contributed to and attended by research students across the UK and beyond, supported by the AHRC.

A further feature of the Essex system is the practical care and attention that we give to our research students. Some research students prefer to work primarily off campus, but for those that need it we provide desk and shelf space in an office with a phone within the Department. Furthermore, all research students have access to the Resource Room (4.201) which provides printing and computing facilities over and above what the University supplies centrally, and to a photocopier. All students also have access to the Departmental Social Space (also referred to as the Common Room) which is located in room 4.305A (next door to the Departmental Office). It has a vending machine for tea, coffee and hot chocolate, and there are foreign language newspapers/magazines to read as well as notice boards which advertise departmental events (such as seminars) and career advice. We encourage our research students to go to conferences, especially to present posters or give presentations: in such cases where students lack funds from other sources it is often possible for the department to provide some financial help.

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