Dear prospective postgraduates,

If you can't make a decision whether linguistics department in Lancaster is a good choice for you or not, please consult our department's website. It describes in detail about course choices, staff members, facilities, and many things you will need to know.

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/

This year the department changes the course titles and choices. But as a whole it doesn't make a drastic change. We cover most areas concerning linguistics, and English language teaching. The flexibility and numbers of choices is what attracts people to study here.

Another reason is that our department, being the top choice for linguistics in UK, as well as in the whole world, has many BIG NAMES, such as Geoffrey Leech, Dick Allwright, Keith Johnson, Norman Fairclough, and many other authorities in this field even studied or taught here before. Hence it is enjoyable in terms of academic input to study here.

Though the tutors are authoritative in academic field, they are kind and inspiring either to build up your confidence or broaden your mind and perspectives in looking at things you learned before or are learning at the current stage. You can achieve self-development and gain awareness about language use, teaching and learning.

Still another reason is that Lancaster is a peaceful and beautiful place, suitable for study, but on the other hand some people might hate it because it might be boring to them. It all depends on how you look at it.

According to our experience, it is easy to panic during the first term when you are not familiar with 'floods' of theoretical input if you have been away from English 'books' for a while, but in the process of writing, you will be more clear about what you have learned.

There are usually 10 weeks for each term, and it means that the tutors will introduce up to 10 topics concerning the course. Therefore it is difficult and too ambitious to follow the schedule and finish all the reading suggested by the tutor. Anyway it is not compulsory to read all of them. It is better have a focus to study further and you may need to decide the topic for your assignment as early as possible and start writing earlier, or you'll get panicking during the end of the term when you are supposed to hand in an assignment. A common phenomenon is that you can see people smiling, partying most of the time during the first half of the term, and then they suddenly become aware and anxious about the fact that they need to start writing assignments.

One suggestion, which might not be a good one, is that after you get the syllabus or reading list from the tutor, you can go to the library and have a look at them to get the gist of each topic. It might help you in deciding the topic. But since each week there is a new topic, you may find the topic introduced later far more interesting. In this case you can consult the tutor earlier. If you don't mind writing later, since we are here to learn not just to write essays, you can wait until you find an interesting topic, but I'd like to remind you of the deadline of 3 essays for the first term:

One: the last day of the term

the other two: the first day (or the third day, as we suggested to the department recently) of the second term.

It means that you may need to spend your holiday worrying about or writing the assignments. It is important to learn how to manage your time well, especially when you have plans for traveling. But usually in the end people will manage to finish them in time.

The deadline for the second term:

One on March17

Another on April 3

The other on May 1

If you are an English teacher, it is better to bring with you your teaching materials, textbooks, students' compositions (a whole class with the same topic or an individual with different topics, tapes of their reading or dialogues, or video tapes of language teaching and learning, your diary or students' regarding teaching or learning experience in the classroom, etc., which you may need to use for your assignments, or as data for your dissertation.

Our department has two computer labs, where you can print your essays or anything you need via printer. So you don't need to buy a printer, or even a computer, but if you prefer using your own in your room, you can still bring one or buy a second-hand one here. As for photocopying, you'll have to buy cards in our department if you want to use the machines outside the lab. We also got a small library with all the dissertations written by students who studied here before.