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Original poster

English language degree - worth doing?

66 replies

CarolinaMooncup · 21/04/2006 14:04

dp's younger brother is thinking of studying English language at university. I was a bit suprised to find you can actually do it tbh - has anyone done it or know whether it's interesting and/or a good degree to have?

Dp's bro is bright and will prob get As and Bs at A level (inc english lang. He isn't doing eng lit btw).

TIA

OP posts:

zippitippitoes · 27/04/2006 12:12

my dd1 is aiming for a media type career..she is studying spanish/politics, but she had a gap year first and is now in Madrid where she is at the uni but more importantly got work experience with a magazine and is now working for a madrid football club too in their press area and has been offered a full time job next year. She has also been offered work with constituency mp this summer in uk and the job she had last year in it customer services for an international company. The main thing is she is very determined and applies for every opportunity. She is also very keen on football and politics. So i think the mainb thing is to make opportunities and a lot of bluff.

I wanted to be a journalist but the nearest i ever got was editor of the nct newsletter !

mcmudda · 27/04/2006 12:15

Friends SALT qualification was from Queen Margaret's College, Edinburgh - that was 6/7 years ago now.

JanH · 27/04/2006 12:17

Hi, squeakycat - you're right of course, sorry for misinformation!

What confused me (easily done) was that one of DD1's housemates started a 3-yr Speech Therapy degree course immediately after finishing her initial 3-yr degree; but she wanted to stay in Leeds, where there isn't a 2-yr PG course (and maybe her other degree wasn't in an appropriate subject either).

DD1's degree was pure linguistics and phonetics - no Eng Lang or Eng Lit or even foreign language. (It's a BA though, SP, not a BSc.) She'll probably do nothing further with it so it was a bit of a dead loss really.

Pruni · 27/04/2006 12:18

I did a couple of years of linguistics in addition to the degree in Eng lang, and they are essentially the same thing, though with linguistics you go into the origins/structure of language rather than of a particular language. It's fascinating. If language is his thing, then linguistics might push a few more buttons than Eng Lang. The other thing is that a lot of scientific techniques are touch on (experiment design/statistics/empirical measurement etc) and that way of thinking is useful in later life. There's also the aspect of forensic linguistics (eg in the recent prosecution of the guy who sent tapes to the police claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper) that was barely developed when I was at uni but has come on a long way - I'd have been really interested in that. And if teaching is an option (can't remember if you said it was) then Applied Linguistics is the thing. (Edinburgh has a good linguistics dept.)

dinosaure · 27/04/2006 12:19

bundle - yes, she was a partner at the firm where I work

very charming but could be utterly terrifying

Bozza · 27/04/2006 12:29

Well it is unlikely that he will end up as a 33 yo mother of two working 3 days a week as an IT analyst. But that is what has happened to me following my English Language and Linguisics degree at Durham.

clerkKent · 27/04/2006 12:41

I suspect the subject of the degree does not matter very much, but the result does (2.1/first), and you have a much better chance of gettign a good degree if the subject is one you love.

Most employers look for practical work experience, even from new graduates, so the thing to do is to get involved with student publications as much as possible and to get holiday jobs for local newspapers.

SenoraPostrophe · 27/04/2006 16:15

OK, sorry, should have said it can be a science.

Jan - don't let your dd think her degree was a waste of time. I really do use the skills I learnt at university all the time. especially at dinner parries . how did she like the grammar section of the course? if she got on well with that she could be a programmer. does she want to live in granada?

SenoraPostrophe · 27/04/2006 16:19

...or, if she wants to use her degree more directly, she could teach english. or be an elocution teacher. or something. if she is like me she will find that it helps a lot in learning a language too.

moondog · 27/04/2006 16:21

lol at Pruni's description of 'droopy shouldered' EFL teachers.How right you are!
Jan,unusual to go from one 3 year degree to another 3 year one to be a SALT although some do.

Most people who have done a degree go onto the 2 year post grad course (like myself! What inspired me was being lucky ewnough to have David Crystal as a lecturer when doing initial French/Linguistics degree)to be a SALT.

If you are an exceptional candidate,they will probably consider an unrelated degree such as Electronics,which a friend of mine had.

Everyone asleep yet??

fennel · 27/04/2006 16:22

there are about 6 or 8 unis in the country which offer a 2 year MSC in SALT, it's quite competitive to get on these masters courses, and if you know from the start you wnat to do SALT it might be best to do it from the beginning.

Linguistics as an academic subject is fascinating. i did some at uni and it bore no relation whatsoever to anything I have ever done since, not even to TEFL linguistics (which i also did). but I really enjoyed it.

moondog · 27/04/2006 16:24

Love all things linguistic.
I write my diary in IPA (phonetics) just for the hell of it.

SenoraPostrophe · 27/04/2006 16:48

ooh - I just tried to type a reply in ipa, but it doesn't like it. I will try to make up for it though by calling you mu:ndog. it's nearly there.

fennel · 27/04/2006 16:55

I have forgotten any IPA i ever knew. I do have bad dreams still about Chomsky and deep structure and revised deep structure and new revised again deep structure or whatever it was.

oy, Bundle, i have to take issue with the idea that psycho/socio linguistics are sunday paper type things. they're very complex and challenging fields and it's just the expertise and clarity of thought of those who've studied them that makes them SOUND simple.

fennel. phd in social/ psycholinguistics.

moondog · 27/04/2006 16:56

lol Fennel
Very [jealous] of your doctorate.Will view your name with deep respect henceforth.
What were you looking at in depth then???

CarolinaMoonfish · 27/04/2006 16:58

thanks for all the ideas! I had no idea this thread was still going

Dino, little BIL is quite into politics or at least political history, and considers it from time to time as an option for university.

He isn't doing any foreign languages for A-level so that's not an option, sadly and neither is TEFL (he's prob not droopy-shouldered enough for it anyway )

The linguistics idea is interesting - a mate of mine did that and really loved it, she did a dissertation on regional variations in swearing.

dinosaure · 27/04/2006 17:00

My little bruv did no languages at A-level either, he just picked them up when he lived abroad.

moondog · 27/04/2006 17:03

Actually,one could do a really interesting study on the individual slang which develops on a forum.

I don't go anywhere else,but am assuming that gems like
'bolleaux' and 'norks' are exclusive to MN?????

fennel · 27/04/2006 17:04

moondog, the PhD started as a psycholinguistic approach to machine translation (which is where the grant money was, it's an affluent area), swerved into sociolinguistics and ended up being a discourse analysis of the way people use language when doing translation tasks, contrasting this to theories of translation which were then used in machine translation theory.

still awake and following? i don't work in that field any more.

dinosaure · 27/04/2006 17:06

No, bolleaux is an old one, been around at least since I was at university, which wasn't yesterday or the day before. It's the punchline to a joke.

zippitippitoes · 27/04/2006 17:06

what is machine translation like talking to your computer or babelfish?

moondog · 27/04/2006 17:06

God,sounds fascinating (sincerely meant btw)

fennel · 27/04/2006 17:08

machine translation was big in the early 90's. loads of money was poured into getting machines to translate between languages automatically. they kept finding it surprisingly hard to get machines to produce anything even vaguely recognisable and so lots of research went into looking at why it was so hard when languages seemed to be based on fairly clear rules.

moondog · 27/04/2006 17:10

Fennel,given myriad subtleties inta and intra language,am surprised that anyone could really see a future in it.

SenoraPostrophe · 27/04/2006 17:13

I always wanted to do something in AI - hence linguistics followed by programming really. all seems a bit too much like hard work now though...

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