English Language (Placement Year)

BA Hons

  • UCAS code Q305
  • Entry year 2026 or 2025
  • A level requirements AAB
  • Duration Full time 4 years
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We welcome applications from the United States of America

We've put together information and resources to guide your application journey as a student from the United States of America.

Overview

Top reasons to study with us

  • 3

    3rd for Linguistics

    The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (2025)

  • World top three for Linguistics QS World University Subject Rankings 2024

  • 4th for Graduate Prospects (Linguistics) Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025

English is the world’s lingua franca. Digital innovations are created, science is advanced, and business is conducted in English. But English is also the language of England, where it first evolved. Explore the kaleidoscope of English variation – its regional dialects, storytellers, and ways of looking at the world – with our global leaders and discover how English works.

Why Lancaster?

  • Learn from renowned experts who are famous for their work in literacies, English dialects, forensic linguistics, Shakespearean language, and language in politics and media
  • Discover the English language from a range of perspectives, drawing on subjects such as history, psychology and politics
  • Benefit from world-leading lab facilities, equipped with the latest language research technology
  • Extend your learning beyond the classroom through our dedicated language research centres and groups
  • Enhance your professional skills with our fully funded internship opportunities, allowing you to work with members of staff on ground-breaking English language research projects

Understanding the English language

If you live in the United Kingdom, you are surrounded by Englishes and their regional idiosyncrasies; if you live outside the United Kingdom, then you are very aware that English remains the world’s lingua franca. Your English is used at work, at home, in conversations with friends, in schools, hospitals and courtrooms, in the news, in films, on social media and in reading great works of literature.

At this point in your life, your English may differ from the English used by people around you. Understanding where English came from, how it works, how it is used and how it is changing is key to understanding our societies, identities, institutions and practices, as well as the place of English in the creative world.

In this fascinating subject, you will study fundamental issues including:

  • The history and development of English
  • The sounds and structures of English
  • The accents and dialects of English in the UK and beyond
  • Varieties of English connected to social variables such as gender and ethnicity

You will have the opportunity to look at the way English is used in advertising, politics, media, literature and the law. You will also learn how technology can be harnessed to study English across large databases and how even small instances of interaction can reveal a person’s stance to the world.

World-leading facilities

Lancaster prides itself on providing outstanding resources and facilities to help support your studies. During your studies, you will have access to several fully equipped laboratories, and research centres including:

You will gain valuable insights into cognitive processes, articulatory phonetics and speech acoustics as well as cultural relativity in language learning and child language analysis. You will develop your research skills and gain valuable hands-on experience that will be attractive to employers.

Your future in mind

English Language is not just a fascinating area of study, but also an opportunity to gain a skill set that opens doors to a range of exciting and rewarding careers. Transferrable skills include a capacity for critical thinking, an ability to gather, organise and analyse large quantities of data, and an aptitude for developing new and innovative ideas.

You will have the chance to develop specialist skills in the lexical and grammatical analysis of English, the use of technology to track trends in the way English is used, and crafting language for creative industries.

Each year, we invite current students to apply for a research internship. These are paid opportunities in which students work closely with academic members of staff on active research projects. These opportunities will allow you to gain advanced research skills that are valuable to employers and apply your academic knowledge in real world situations.

Recently, our students have worked as interns on the following projects:

  • Accent variation in historic north Lancashire
  • Discourses around vaccinations during the Covid-19 pandemic
  • En Clair: Forensic Linguistics, Literary Detection, and Language Mysteries podcast

Which course?

We offer degrees in Linguistics, English Language, and Language Sciences. Which programme is right for you depends on your interests.

Linguistics

Our Linguistics degree is focussed on general principles of language, including its properties, development, variation and use.

English Language

Our English Language degree focusses on how these issues relate to English in particular, including the sounds and structures of English, its history, its regional and global varieties, and its use in areas like politics, the media, and advertising.

Language Sciences

Discover the fascinating science of language – from how children acquire language skills to how machines comprehend and produce language.

Linguistics and English Language

Our combined degree Linguistics and English Language gives you the best of both worlds.

Meet our staff

Get to know some members of our staff. In the videos they give brief insights into their research interests and teaching.

Sam Kirkham

Dr Sam Kirkham discusses articulatory phonetics, demonstrating how ultrasound technology allows us to observe the dance of the tongue during speech production.

Claire Nance

Professor Claire Nance discusses sounds of the world’s languages using ‘r’ as an example, which articulatorily complex and varies in its articulation across different languages.

Chris Hart

Professor Christopher Hart discusses linguistic relativity and the language of Tzeltal, which describes object locations as uphill, downhill or across the hill rather than using words for left and right.

George Brown

Dr George Brown discusses computational linguistics and its contributions to speech technology including text-to-speech conversion and AI.

Claire Hardaker

Dr Claire Hardaker discusses forensic linguistics and the different tasks that forensics linguists perform for the police, including authorship analysis and profiling.

Your Placement Year

Sometimes known as a year in industry, your placement year will take place between your second and final year of study and this will extend your degree to four years.

Placements and Internships

Hear from students and employers on how Lancaster University could support you to gain real-world experience and bolster your CV with a placement or internship as part of your degree.

A student working on a piece of stained glass.

A placement year is an excellent way to...

  • try out a role that you may be interested in as a career path
  • start to build your professional network (some placement students are offered permanent roles to return to after they graduate)
  • develop skills, knowledge and experience to put you ahead of the field when you graduate

You'll spend your third year...

in a graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. A very wide range of companies and organisations offer placements across all sectors.

As a full-time employee, you’ll have a job description with specific responsibilities and opportunities to access training and development, the same as other employees.

A whiteboard showing a diagram of 'how to create a CV'

Our Careers and Placements Team...

will help you to search and compete for a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews.

You will still be a Lancaster University student during your placement and we’ll keep in touch to check how you are getting on.

Students drinking coffee in a campus coffee bar

The university will...

use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.

If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.

Careers

A degree in English Language will give you valuable skills such as data analysis, evaluating evidence and persuasive argumentation. These skills can be deployed in a multitude of career paths. To provide just some examples, our graduates have become:

  • Marketing professionals in large corporations and small businesses
  • Journalists for national outlets as well as local newspapers
  • Teachers from primary level to university level

You may also choose to pursue a career as the following:

  • Speech and language therapist
  • PR and communication specialist
  • Lexicographer

For English Language graduates in the future workforce, there are opportunities in digitising historical resources, analysing online harms, and managing social media policy. A degree in English Language could put you at the forefront of these societal developments.

Studying English Language at Lancaster also equips you with the foundation to progress onto further study, with many graduates going on to pursue a master’s or PhD.

Careers and employability support

Our degrees open up an extremely wide array of career pathways in businesses and organisations, large and small, in the UK and overseas.

We run a paid internship scheme specifically for our arts, humanities and social sciences students, supported by a specialist Employability Team. The team offer individual consultations and tailored application guidance, as well as careers events, development opportunities, and resources.

Whether you have a clear idea of your potential career path or need some help considering the options, our friendly team is on hand.

Lancaster is unique in that every student is eligible to participate in The Lancaster Award which recognises activities such as work experience, community engagement or volunteering and social development. A valuable addition to your CV!

Find out more about Lancaster’s careers events, extensive resources and personal support for Careers and Employability.

Careers

Find out about some of the careers our alumni have entered into after graduation.

Entry requirements

These are the typical grades that you will need to study this course. You may need to have qualifications in relevant subjects. In some cases we may also ask you to attend an interview or submit a portfolio. You must also meet our English language requirements.

Find more about these qualifications and others not shown here

Learn about how we will assess your application

Qualifications and typical requirements accordion

Contact Admissions

If you are thinking of applying to Lancaster and you would like to ask us a question, please complete our enquiry form and one of our team will get back to you.

International foundation programmes

Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored foundation pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University degrees. Visit the INTO Lancaster University website for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.

Contextual admissions

Contextual admissions could help you gain a place at university if you have faced additional challenges during your education which might have impacted your results. Visit our contextual admissions page to find out about how this works and whether you could be eligible.

Course structure

Enhancing our curriculum

We continually review and enhance our curriculum to ensure we are delivering the best possible learning experience, and to make sure that the subject knowledge and transferable skills you develop will prepare you for your future.

We will publish more detailed information about the structure of this degree course for 2026-entry in June 2025, ahead of our summer undergraduate open days. This will include overviews of the core modules you will take and examples of optional modules which may be available to you.

Fees and funding

We set our fees on an annual basis and the 2026/27 entry fees have not yet been set.

As a guide, our fees in 2025/26 were:

Home International
£9,535 £24,700

Fees and funding information

Additional fees and funding information accordion

Scholarships and bursaries

Details of our scholarships and bursaries for students starting in 2026 are not yet available.

You can use our scholarships for 2025-entry applicants as guidance.

Important information

The information on this site relates primarily to 2026/2027 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.

The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.

More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.

Our Students’ Charter

We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.

Undergraduate open days 2025

Our summer and autumn open days will give you Lancaster University in a day. Visit campus and put yourself in the picture.

Undergraduate Open Days
two students sitting and reading on some outdoor steps

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  • The city and beyond

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