Applied linguistics offers a fascinating opportunity to study the interaction between language and the real world. Our staff are specialists in the areas of psycholinguistics, language development, second language acquisition and motivation theories of language learning. We host research in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, with particular specialisms in health communication, professional communication, and language, gender and sexuality. We are unique in offering opportunities to do research in literary linguistics, narratology and cognitive poetics. A PhD is mainly made up of independent study, with supervision meetings spread throughout the year. There are no taught credits attached to a PhD, although it is compulsory for full-time students to attend the Arts Faculty Researcher Skills training programme.