Program's Quality Assurance
Applied Linguistics at a glance
Nowadays, there is an increasing need in the training of specialists in language learning processes, both in education as well as in language planning. Such factors as immigration fluxes, the globalization of economy, increasing multilingualism as well as the building of the Common European Space have undoubtedly helped create this need.
Applied Linguistics is the field that caters to a wide range of linguistic issues as they relate to real world problems and contexts. It is also the area in which many academics around the world conduct their research, focusing on a range of disciplines related to language and education.
Postgraduate degrees in Applied Linguistics
The University of Barcelona offers two postgraduate degrees in Applied Linguistics: a Master’s and a doctoral program. The Master’s degree in “Applied Linguistics and second language acquisition in multilingual contexts” is considered the “training” period. It is designed to cover the theoretical and empirical dimensions of Applied Linguistics and offers an introduction to research through a series of courses. A successful completion of the Master’s program leads to the doctoral program considered the “research” period in which students’ ongoing work is supervised by an expert in the area.
For more information about the Master’s program, follow this link: http://www.ub.edu/masteroficial/laalcm/ .
PhD program in a nutshell
The doctoral program at the University of Barcelona was offered for the first time in 2000 and was a pioneer in this field of study in Spain. The program is coordinated by the GRAL group (Language Acquisition Research), and has obtained the label of “Excellence” by the Catalan government. The quality of this PhD has also been acknowledged by the Spanish ‘Ministerio de Educación’, which has recognized the program with a Quality Award since 2003 until the present (MCD2008-00025). Nowadays the program is fully consolidated with an international student body, a stable group of graduate research assistants, a regular program of visiting lecturers from prestigious universities abroad, and student-oriented faculty members with extensive research experience in the field.
Lines of research
The European doctoral program in Applied Linguistics at the University of Barcelona provides rigorous training for specialists in research and education. The program offers three broad fields of study:
- second language acquisition
- integrated language learning
- classroom research and discourse analysis
These fields can be investigated in a number of contexts (instructed/informal, monolingual/bilingual, study abroad/at home etc) and under different research paradigms (statistical, survey, interpretative, etc.).
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