Tag: NewcastleUniversity

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English Language & Linguistics, Email 1

Hello Everyone

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study at Newcastle University! My name is Christine Cuskley and I’m a Lecturer in Language and Cognition here at Newcastle, where we hope to welcome you this autumn.

Lecturers and professors here in English Language and Linguistics are hard at work updating our teaching programme for the autumn – more specific reading lists for your modules will be available later in the summer. However, in the meantime, we encourage you delve into some more general – and even entertaining – material to get you excited about getting started in your studies.

There are some great podcasts about language and linguistics that you should check out – you could have a listen while taking your favourite walk or milling around the house! Dive into this great, exhaustive list of podcasts related to language and linguistics.

This list is so big that you may not know where to start – one good jumping off point is this episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is an important tool used in linguistics to describe the sounds in the world’s languages. The podcast delves into what the IPA is for, and digs deeper into the history of how it was developed. In your first year, you’ll learn lots more about how we study sounds in language – including how to understand and use the IPA. If the podcast piques your interest, you check out this interactive online IPA chart, or challenge yourself with this quick exercise from the UK Linguistics Olympiad.

You’ll also be delving into the study of language variation and change – how languages vary across space and time. Check out this episode of BBC sounds on The Future of English: Dialects and Evolution. They look at varieties of English all over the world – have a listen and think about the differences they discuss. What do you think about the future of English?

Let us know if you find any favourites among those podcasts, either by email or by social media. Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best,
Christine Cuskley
Lecturer in Language and Cognition

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English Literature (Q306) Offer Holder, Email 1

Hello Everyone

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study English Literature (Q306) at Newcastle University! I am the undergraduate admissions director for English and a lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. My colleagues and I hope to welcome you to our department this autumn, where I will be teaching our ‘Close Reading’ and ‘Transformations’ modules to students.

We will send out reading lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we have updated our teaching to take the latest research into account. For now, we have prepared some more general material to help you get ready for university study. This email contains some of that material, and will be followed by others, each one written by a lecturer at Newcastle and tailored to this strange, unprecedented time that you and we find ourselves in. If you have any questions about the material in these emails, or want to receive even more, please do get in touch with us through social media or email.

So what do I have to recommend to you today? I have a task that will lead to some new reading. First, the task:

I would like you to make a list of every book you remember having studied in your English (or ‘English Literature’) classes, and then think about what this list might show you.

• What do these books have in common?
• Are they mainly novels, plays or poems?
• When were they written?
• What kind of things are they about?
• Where do their authors come from?
• What class, gender, age (etc.) are those authors?

Once you have answered these questions, and others of your own devising, the next step is two-fold. First, identify a work of literature that has nothing in common with anything on your list. Perhaps that might be a book of poems by a working-class woman who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote about domestic servitude; perhaps that might be a play written and performed in the last two years. Why not read (or watch) that thing? As you engage with it, think about how you might write about it: can you analyse it like you analysed the texts you studied this year? What else do you feel you need to know?

My colleagues and I would love to hear what you discover this way. This task is intended to make you think in general terms about what constitutes ‘English Literature’ (and what does not seem to) and connects to larger theories about what we call ‘canonicity’. You can get in touch with us through email or social media.

Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best wishes,
James Harriman-Smith
Lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Undergraduate Admissions Director

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Are you #NCLReady?

With many students having ended their school studies in an impromptu fashion, we know many of you will be looking for ways to prepare for university.

We will be sending out Reading Lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we’ve updated our teaching to take the latest research into account. So for now we’re preparing more general material to support you in your preparations for university. Here is what we have in store…

1. We’re sending out emails to all our Offer Holders with summer reading suggestions and tasks. These will be written by academics who hope to welcome you in the Autumn, and will be tailored to the programmes you’ve applied to.

2. We’re using #NCLReady on Twitter to signpost you to further free resources, interesting articles and more.

3. We’re planning some more blog posts – just like this one, but with even more content.

We’d love to hear how you find the tasks and resources so do let us know! Follow the blog. Follow our social media channels. Keep an eye on your emails. But most of all, keep safe and enjoy your summer.