English Linguistics

Overview courses

• Introduction to Linguistics

  This course provides you with elementary knowledge of formal linguistics and of language use. At the end of this course, you will be able to correctly use basic linguistic terminology and you will be familiar with the basics of the linguistic domains of language acquisition and language disorders, phonetics and phonologiy, morphology, syntax, language variation and language contact, semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics. You will also become aware of the role that linguistics plays in society, such as in speech/ language therapy and in educational environments. After the course, you will also be able to perform basic linguistics analyses on language datasets from languages you do not speak. 

• Literacy Development

  In this course, we examine how reading skills develop during the course of children’s and adolescents’ lives, to what extent this development is affected by personal characteristics such as motivation and which role families and schools play. Themes that are discussed are: emergent literacy, reading motivation, reading comprehension and ICT.

• Second Language Acquisition

  This course is focused on a particular set of questions related to the research domain of second language acquisition. Are adult second language learners able to learn a language in the same way as children acquiring their first language? What is the role of innate language principles? What is the effect of language teaching on the second language acquisition process? You will analyse these questions and evaluate how we can make second language education as effective as possible.

• Analysing Text and Talk

  The course is designed to learn about the linguistic and pragmatic differences between written and spoken texts and their similarities. During the course you will become familiar with various theories and methods that will help you to plan for your thesis and further research. You will learn to take a critical view on different modes of communication and how they co-construct meaning in their social contexts.

• Advanced English Language Skills (blended learning)

  After successfully completing this course, you will have further refined your Dutch-to-English translation skills and will be able to give a successful oral presentation on an academic topic. You will also have demonstrated your grammatical competence and acquired further insight into grammatical differences between English and Dutch.