Psychology & English Language

Course outline

This course is designed to help you gain a thorough grounding in the principles and research methods of psychology, and develop your theoretical understanding of the English language and its role in the world today.

Your studies will relate knowledge about the English language to issues in the wider world, with a focus on practical problem solving in, for example, legal, educational and business practices.

The course emphasises the practical application of English Language studies through professionally relevant modules covering a range of topics, including language in legal contexts, business and intercultural communication, and learning and teaching English. There are also further opportunities for specialised and guided investigation into specific aspects of English language, through elective modules and a compulsory dissertation in an area of your choice.

The distinctive flavour of studying psychology at Aston is the emphasis which is placed on applied as well as theoretical studies of psychology. The course covers a wide range of issues in, and theories of, cognitive, developmental and social psychology, psychobiology, and individual differences.

Your placement year will give you the opportunity to apply your key skills and competencies within a real work-based situation.

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Subject guide & modules

Psychology & English Language students take 120 credits of modules per year, 60 from psychology modules and 60 from English language modules. A 10 credit module comprises approximately 100 learning hours and has up to three contact hours per week.

Year 1

• Research Methods and Statistics (20 credits)

• Cognitive Psychology 1a

• Social Psychology 1

• Developmental Psychology

• Introduction to Psychology

• Introduction to English Language: across time and space

• Introduction to English Language: social applications

• Introduction to English Language: contexts, modes and media

• Introduction to English Language: language in society

• Words and Meaning

• Grammar and Meaning

  
  

Year 2

During your second year you study eight core modules, and select three elective modules.

• Advanced Statistics (20 credit module)

• Language & Communication

• Psychological Research Methods

• Social Psychology 2

• Cognitive Psychology 2a

• Research Methods in Language and Communication

• Variations of English

• Working with Language Data

• Language at Work (Elective module)

• Introduction to Intercultural Business Communication (Elective module)

• Computer-mediated communication (Elective module)

• The Language of the Law (Elective module)

• Stylistics (Elective module)

• Language in the News Media (Elective module)
  

Placement year

At Aston the placement year is an integral part of your course, and contributes to your final grade. Find out more about the Psychology & English Language placement year.

Final year

During your final year you will write a dissertation on an agreed topic of your choice and have the opportunity to specialise in the areas of English Language of particular interest and relevance to your career. You will also complete core psychology modules and undertake a research project in an area of psychology of your choice.

• Psychology Final Year Project (30 credit module)

• Personality and Intelligence

• Cognitive Neuropsychology

• Child Development

• Spoken Discourse Analysis

• Dissertation in English Language (20 credit module)

• Language as Evidence (Elective module)

• Language and Gender (Elective module)

• Learning English (Elective module)

• Critical Discourse Analysis (Elective module)

• Corpus Linguistics (Elective module)

• Multimodal Analysis (Elective module)

• Linguistics of the Individual (Elective module)

Learning, teaching & assessment

You'll be taught through lectures, seminars, tutorials and practical classes, group-working, case studies. Traditional teaching is supported by a virtual learning environment that is used to host a range of electronic supporting materials.

There is a much stronger emphasis on reading and on your own private, independent study than at pre-degree level. To help you manage your learning, we set out your work for the year in an online student guide. This includes full details of all modules including week-by-week lecture breakdowns, reading lists and all coursework assignments for the year with the relevant deadlines.

We use a range of assessment methods and most modules are assessed with a combination of coursework and an end of year examination. Coursework includes essays, research reports, individual and group projects, statistics assignments, class tests and both individual and group presentations.

For further information, see the programme specification (PDF).

Placement year

The placement year is an opportunity for you to set your studies in context and valuable professional experience. It is highly attractive to potential employers and many of our students are offered graduate jobs by their placement employer.

You can choose whether your placement has a psychology or English language focus, or you can choose a more generic placement experience – for example, in business. Your placement may be in the UK or abroad, and at Aston the average placement year salary is around £16,000.

Recent students have completed placements in the following roles/ organisations:

• Communications Officer at the Science and Technology Facilities Council

• English Language Teaching Assistant at Toyo Gakuen University, Japan

• Comenius Teaching Assistant, Cyprus

• Online Activism Volunteer, Friends of the Earth;

• Publishing Intern, Summersdale Publishers Limited

You'll receive plenty of help and advice in finding your placement and specialist support and supervision from the University during your placement.

Find out more about placement years at Aston.

Professional accreditation

This course is accredited as conferring eligibility for the Graduate Membership of the British Psychological Society (BPS)  provided the minimum standard of a Second Class Honours is achieved. This is the first step towards becoming a Chartered Psychologist.

Career prospects

Our Psychology and English Language graduates go on to pursue a very wide range of career paths. Graduates enter business and commercial careers, caring and social careers, teaching and local government careers and many others. Progression rate to a first job is very high for Aston students and career prospects are good.

Our graduates have excellent communication and teamwork skills, are critical and analytic and can design, conduct and analyse and evaluate research.

Graduate destinations 

Graduates who have studied a Joint Honours Psychology or English Language course at Aston, have a strong track record in finding jobs.

Our recent graduates have gone on to work in organisations including the Civil Service, the Police Service, local government, the NHS, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office  Nestlé, QinetiQ, Deloitte and IBM.

Potential careers for graduates include: publishing, linguistic computing, journalism, law,
the Civil Service and the media (including advertising, marketing and public relations). This course is also an excellent springboard for careers in professional areas of psychology including occupational, educational and clinical  psychology.

Personal development

This course is designed to also give you a range of transferable and practical skills to succeed within your chosen career. We make extensive use of group working and presentations to prepare you for the reality of working life. Such work develops your team working and negotiating skills.

Our placement year gives you the opportunity to gain practical work experience that is invaluable in developing an appreciation of issues which cannot be replicated in the lecture room.

Facilities & equipment

Aston University has recently invested over £400,000 to establish dedicated  psychology laboratories for our students. These include tools for psychophysiological measurement, a driving simulator, eye tracking technology, an observation suite (with covert audiovisual recording), motion-capture technology, cubicles for computer-based cognitive experiments and larger labs for focus groups and audience based experiments.

These facilities enable our final year students to conduct high quality research projects under the supervision of our Psychology staff.

Find out more about the learning and teaching facilities at Aston.

Teaching staff

Although based in the School of Life and Health Sciences, this course is taught jointly with staff from the School of Languages & Social Science.

Further information

For more information, please contact the Life and Health Sciences Admissions Office on 0121 204 4097 or lhsadmissions@aston.ac.uk.