English Language in the Media BA (Hons)

Lancaster University

Would you like to focus on how language is used in historical, contemporary, and emerging forms of media? This degree scheme will allow you to analyse how language is used in newspapers, on websites, blogs, and social media, and how language differs depending on both the medium and genre. .

You will begin your academic career with us on the core English Language module. How do you describe the English Language in terms of its grammatical and sound systems? How does it function in different contexts? How does language interact with society? As well as exploring these questions, you will explore newer and emerging fields such as conversation analysis, corporate communication, and corpus linguistics. You also take two other subjects to complement your major. English Language and Linguistics are popular choices, but you could select subjects from other related disciplines.

In the second year, you’ll move on to core subjects such as English Phonetics, The Language of Advertising and Understanding Media. You can also pick from modules such as Stylistics and Corporate communication. As a third-year undergraduate, your options include Forensic Linguistics, Language and Identities and Language Change in English and Beyond. You’ll also write your dissertation, exploring a topic that you’re particularly interested in. This is overseen by a member of staff from our department who specialises in your particular area. Given the size of the department, our academics can supervise a very wide range of subjects covering most students’ special interests.