Applied Linguistics – (Ph.D.)

The University of Essex is one of the UK's leading academic institutions, ranked ninth nationally for research excellence following the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).We offer supervision for our PhD Applied Linguistics in the area of second language acquisition and learning.

Within this field, we have expertise in: second language syntax, explicit and implicit knowledge and learning, vocabulary learning and use, individual differences in second language learning, language testing, figurative language and discourse processing, and computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Examples of PhD projects which our students have undertaken include the acquisition of the English article system by native speakers of Korean and Spanish, the relationship of working memory and self-correction behaviour in instructed second language learners' speech, and second language acquisition mediated by a CALL environment. This PhD is available as a PhD by Supervised Research (three years) and as an Integrated New Route PhD (four years).

Many of our former PhD students work in higher education institutions around the world, as teachers and/or as academic researchers. Other career paths our former PhD students have taken include publishing, social work, administration, and retail.

We also offer an MPhil in this subject.