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.

• Psycholinguistics

  This course is an introduction to psycholinguistics, an interdisciplinary scientific field that integrates concepts and techniques from modern linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. Through lectures, assignments, and hands-on sessions you will gain knowledge and learn skills to address questions like: How do we produce, perceive and recognize spoken and written language? How do we acquire language(s)? How is linguistic knowledge represented, structured and stored in our mind and brain, and how does this work in real-time language use?

• 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.