📚About the Program
Master’s in
Applied Linguistics - TEFL
at
University of Groningen
Can you learn a second language the same way you learned your mother tongue? How does our brain cope with two or more languages? What is the best way to test the language proficiency level of students? How can computers and online technology help to learn a language? And how do we find out whether a given teaching pedagogy is effective? Find out in this master's track.
This one-year master's track focuses on research into foreign language learning and teaching. You will study the process of learning and the use of second languages. The track allows you to focus your research on your language of choice, for instance, English as a second or foreign language but also Dutch as a second language, French, German, Swedish, Chinese, or any other language. With increasing cross-cultural communication and mobility, the skills and knowledge you will acquire in this programme are highly valued in the areas of language teaching and testing, educational publishing, language policy making, and of course linguistic research.
You will approach second language acquisition from many different angles, including (cognitive) psychology, social interaction, and language teaching. You will not only be introduced to the field of linguistics, language acquisition, and language teaching and assessment theory but also the neighboring field of social and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. As such, our MA program is a truly multidisciplinary master’s track.
The master's track focuses especially on dynamic aspects of language development, which explains how the process of second language development is affected by the changing interaction of a wide range of factors. You will learn about the social, psychological, and cultural processes that interact in using a language or that may cause the use of a second language to grow or decline. You will explore theoretical developments and didactic applications of recent research, and learn about computer-assisted language learning. Although this is not a teacher training programme, there is ample opportunity to discuss issues related to teaching and in some cases, it is possible to do a language teaching internship in an academic setting.
While the first semester consists of a fixed set of courses, the second semester allows you to focus on your own interests within the field of Applied Linguistics. You will write a Master’s thesis on a topic of choice and you will take another course and/or do an internship (e.g. a research internship, or an internship in language teaching in an academic setting, educational publishing, or language testing, to give some examples). It is possible to switch to the Research Master programme ‘Language and Cognition' after this programme.
Show less
Show more