4-Term Pathway - Foundation Certificate in Social Sciences - Continue to Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - Linguistics with Data Science (Placement Year)

An understanding of language enhances our self-awareness, inspiring us to address fundamental questions about our communication as human beings. Linguistics is an increasingly important subject, impacting on areas in psychology, philosophy, education and artificial intelligence. It has real-world applications in such diverse fields as human rights, computer-assisted language learning, and the study of institutional language in settings like doctor-patient interactions, interviewer-interviewee dialogues, and courtroom exchanges.

This course will give students the unique skillset of using data science to tackle these topics by engaging with tools such as analysing large corpora of texts, conducting experiments, statistical analysis, and machine learning. It will allow students to develop their research and IT skills by collecting and analysing linguistic data using state-of-the-art technology, and a combination of team-work and independent projects will enhance their communication, problem-solving, and management skills.

At Essex, students will acquire a broad foundation in the study of language. Their diverse research looks at this uniquely human phenomenon from several angles: the structures that exist in the world’s languages, the variation in how people speak them, how humans process and understand language, and how languages are learned and best taught.