Prepare for the contemporary culturally diverse workplace by expanding your understanding of core Intercultural Communication theories and concepts.

Culture can powerfully shape communication. Communication, in turn, is central to getting things done in any organisation. This role of culture has been prominently recognised in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, leading organisations to increasingly value culturally competent communication.

You will explore questions such as:

• What do we mean by ‘culture’?
• What are some of the dimensions on which ‘cultures’ are said to vary?
• What makes communication ‘intercultural’?
• What is ‘intercultural competence’ and how can we develop and assess it?
• What are some of the key culturally influenced barriers to communication and what linguistic strategies can we use to overcome them?

You will critically evaluate key theories and concepts pertaining to these questions and apply them to the analysis of a small sample of real data.

Intercultural business communication plays a key role in the global economy and world commerce as it considers cultural differences between international business partners and clients. On this interdisciplinary module, you will examine how communication is affected by different values, attitudes and beliefs, in the context of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

You will learn how to effectively interact, work and develop meaningful relationships with professionals across different cultures and social groups: essential skills in a global workforce.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research,you’ll gain the necessary awareness, know-how and practical skills needed to become more effective at intercultural interactions. You will use various models to analyse your own experiences and develop a personal development plan to address effective interactions at work in the face of significant challenges. Studying intercultural business communication will foster an understanding of your own cultural, linguistic and communication related background. This may benefit future careers that operate within a multicultural context.

Our societies and workplaces are culturally diverse in many ways - age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion, socio-economic background and more. Most communicative encounters can thus be seen as ‘intercultural’, and different cultural groups can have markedly different beliefs and expectations around these encounters. This module will explore this in detail.

You will examine questions such as:

• What is the best way to make a point when we negotiate?
• What are acceptable topics for discussion while waiting for a meeting to start?
• What makes a convincing answer to a story-based job interview question?
• Should symptoms be presented in a diagnostic interview?
• What is the most appropriate way to demonstrate interest in a conversation?

Working in small mixed culture teams, you will present a plausible scenario of an intercultural encounter and, drawing on Intercultural Communication theories, analyse what makes it (un)successful. You will also analyse independently how a social issue is presented in the media and identify possible impacts on communication.

Pursuing a postgraduate degree requires a range of advanced study and research skills. These include selecting and critically engaging with relevant literature, adopting effective reading strategies, identifying a research gap, formulating answerable research questions. These steps will guide you in developing an independent research project.

With the support of a supervisor, you will consider the ethical dimensions of data collection, conduct your analysis, interpret the results and reflect on the wider implications of your findings. You will develop an academic writing style appropriate to your discipline, following relevant conventions, addressing issues such as referencing and plagiarism.

This module aims to enhance your academic practice and guide your dissertation project through a programme of compulsory and optional lectures, workshops, writing retreats and self-study resources. What you learn will underpin your success in your MA coursework and the final dissertation, providing the tools and strategies to do research with confidence and academic integrity.

Familiarise yourself with the ways in which language tests and their components are developed and evaluated in this exciting module.

Starting with an overview of basic concepts and principles in language testing, you will then consider how language constructs – what we seek to measure – are defined, and how they may be realised in test tasks. It reviews a variety of common contemporary testing techniques and formats and it addresses current challenges for language test design, relating to developments in technology (e.g., how to utilise generative artificial intelligence) and to improved understanding from the field of second language acquisition of how languages are learnt.

We aim to help you to design language tests, and to evaluate test items critically, through the application and interpretation of descriptive statistics.

In this module, you will progress from the fundamentals of historical research to the expert skills needed for your master's dissertation and for further research. You will develop the techniques used by professional historians, not only in undertaking research, but also in guiding research through peer review towards publication.

The module will follow the key steps in the production and dissemination of historical research, examining such topics as:

• Working with archival sources
• The nature of your field and identifying the key players in it
• Devising and honing your research questions
• The requirements for academic writing
• Offering and responding to peer review
• Presenting the strengths and weaknesses of research to specialist audiences in formats such as book reviews
• The dilemmas posed by artificial intelligence

Through a series of workshops, lecturers draw on their own experiences and yours to guide you through the processes of research, writing and dissemination.

Language and other forms of communication are instrumental in defining social issues, identities and relations. This module presents the latest topics and methodological developments in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) – a field that aims to identify and expose the precise semiotic means by which power and inequality are enacted and challenged through discourse.

You will be introduced to foundational ideas concerning the relationship between texts, discourse practice and society, as well as a range of analytical frameworks employed in contemporary CDS to deconstruct texts and reveal their ideological and persuasive properties. Reflecting changes in the political and media landscape, you will explore communicative modes beyond language, including gestures and images.

Through practical textual analysis, you will use the tools of CDS to consider some of the most pressing issues currently facing society, such as right-wing populism, the right to political protest and the role of digital activism in effecting social change.

Explore how multilingualism and language policy intersect with broader social, political and economic structures in this fascinating module.

You will investigate how language is shaped by power structures and, in turn, shapes society across different domains such as the state, institutions, corporations and families. Topics include:

• Language and social justice
• Governmentality
• Commodification
• Policymaking

Through the discussion of current applied research, you will develop critical thinking skills and gain insight into the methodological approaches used in this field. A key focus will be understanding how language practices and policies contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities, and how they could also serve as tools for resistance and change.

By the end of the module, you will be equipped to critically engage with multilingualism and language policy debates, assess relevant research and consider the ethical and political implications of language use in diverse contexts.

This specialist module introduces you to the latest theories, methods and applications of metaphor research.

Metaphor has become a focal point of research in linguistics and cognitive science where, far from an occasional literary fancy, it is recognised as a fundamental cognitive process that shapes our thoughts and actions in almost all aspects of life.

You will be introduced to contemporary theories of metaphor beginning with conceptual metaphor theory but further including the idea of metaphor scenarios, as well as more discourse dynamic and mental simulation approaches to metaphor. Through these frameworks, you will explore both the creative and the cognitive functions of metaphor and metaphorical expression in communicative modes besides language.

You will also engage with issues around identifying and classifying metaphors in discourse. The module will finish by looking at some of the real-world topics where metaphor particularly matters, including in connection with politics, health and the environment.

Examine meanings in communication and discover some core areas of pragmatics in this fascinating module. How do people mean more than they literally say? How do people understand those implied meanings? What is the role of culture? You will explore these questions and more.

The module is organised around four communicative areas:

• The first examines speaker intention and frameworks for describing speech acts or pragmatic acts
• The second examines hearer inferencing and comprehension, including frameworks such as Gricean implicature and Relevance Theory
• The third examines the interpersonal dynamics of interaction, especially politeness and impoliteness theories
• The fourth examines context, particularly the role of culture

Throughout the module, emphasis is placed on the application of pragmatic theory to 'real' data, and how that application affords insights into both the data and the theory. Data will mainly include spoken interactions, but other data types will be encountered too. The module concludes with a consideration of method in pragmatics and interaction.

Join us as we introduce you to variationist sociolinguistics, where you’ll explore how and why speakers choose among different forms in language — across pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary — based on social factors.

You’ll see how age, gender, social class, ethnicity and community networks shape the selection of linguistic variants. We’ll work with the concept of variables, examining both external influences (such as speech style or social demographic) and internal constraints (like position in the word or phrase) that govern variation, and you'll learn how to collect speech data in the Labovian style. You will also learn to code phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical variables and apply quantitative analysis techniques using sociolinguistic software.

By conducting your own research project, you’ll connect patterns and processes of language change, gaining practical experience in data-driven sociolinguistic methods and discovering how social life and language evolve together. This hands-on approach ensures you graduate confident in using quantitative sociolinguistic tools and interpreting variation in everyday language.