Why choose Essex for a Graduate Course in Linguistics or ELT?

Female student reading The Department of Language and Linguistics at Essex has been offering degrees in Linguistics for four decades. In that time we’ve steadily increased in size, and are now one of the largest and most prestigious departments of this kind anywhere in the world. We have 24 specialist teaching and research staff in Linguistics and over 200 graduate students, roughly half pursuing an MA, and half a PhD.

Why Essex?

There are lots of reasons why Essex is one of the places to be if you’re looking for a course in Linguistics or TEFL/TESOL/ELT. Like what? Well…

  • We currently offer more than 20 MA programmes in four areas: Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics; Sociolinguistics; General/Theoretical/Descriptive/Computational Linguistics; and Applied Linguistics and ELT - more than anywhere else in England!
  • We offer both highly specialised and more general  programmes with flexible syllabuses, and we currently have ESRC recognition for seven of our MA schemes.
  • Our graduate programmes are open to both full-time and part-time students.
  • Our teaching is informed by cutting-edge world-class research.  
  • High ratings are given in student surveys  to our departmental modules, teaching, facilities, and the friendliness, approachability and helpfulness of our staff.
  • Our department has a strong research group culture fostering peer support and collaboration, with staff regularly collaborating and co-publishing with their research students.
  • The Department provides excellent research facilities, including dedicated laboratories for running reaction-time and eye-movement monitoring experiments, and language corpus facilities such as the British National Corpus and CHILDES.
  • There are currently approximately 15,900 volumes in the library's Linguistics holdings and subscriptions to 150 linguistics journals.
    Essex staff and students are part of a thriving international community, with currently around 40% of students coming from outside the UK.
  • The campus location of the university means that everything you need is close at hand (library, lecture theatres, classrooms, computing labs, staff offices, sports and leisure facilities, shops, cafeterias, bars, entertainment) and there are security staff to attend to your safety.
  • The campus is on a greenfield site (750 acres of parkland with three lakes) close to the historic Roman town of Colchester, and an hour away by train from London and from Stansted international airport. 
  • There’s plenty of student accommodation on campus, and costs are generally lower and the quality of life higher than elsewhere in the South-East of England. 

Further Information

Last modified on 11 May 2012.