As an alternative to taking a complete Master's or Postgraduate Certificate programme, you can take our individual specialist postgraduate courses for institutional credit. These are ideal if you need to develop knowledge and skills in a specific area. Courses are currently available on topics in Corpus Linguistics and in Language Testing. Each course can be taken separately – they run for one term (three months) and are offered online.
Fees per course (one term)
2026/27
20 credit modules: £1,340 (UK and International) 30 credit modules: £2,010 (UK and International)
2027/28
We set our fees on an annual basis and the 2027/28 entry fees have not yet been set.
Online learning
The courses are delivered via Lancaster’s high-quality virtual learning site. You will have access to the University’s extensive online library resources, and there will be plenty of opportunities during the course to interact with other students and your tutors.
To complete the course for credit, you will need to pass the assignment. You will receive detailed information about the assignment and its assessment.
Corpus Linguistics courses
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Equipping you with the skills to design and build your own language corpus from the ground up, this course focuses on the essential capability for independent research.
You’ll learn how to sample language data effectively, collect it from written, spoken, or digital sources and prepare it for analysis through annotation, metadata recording and formatting. Drawing on Â鶹ֱ²¥’s long-standing expertise in corpus development, the course uses real-world examples from projects such as the British National Corpus 2014, Trinity Lancaster Corpus and Guangwai Lancaster Corpus of L2 Chinese.
You’ll explore different corpus types including learner, multimodal and spoken corpora, while also learning practical steps such as XML conversion, POS tagging and dealing with copyright considerations.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to create a custom corpus tailored to your own research questions— gaining a highly transferable skill in linguistics, data science, education, language technology and further domains.
This course usually runs between January and March in Term 2.
This course explores how corpus tools and techniques can be used to enhance language teaching across a range of contexts—from English as a second/foreign language to English for Academic Purposes and secondary school instruction.
You will learn how to integrate corpora into the classroom, develop data-driven learning materials and use learner language analysis to tailor instruction more effectively. The course balances theory and practice: you’ll gain a solid understanding of corpus-based principles and explore how to apply them to teach grammar, vocabulary, speaking and writing. We will also consider the advantages and challenges of integrating GenAI tools with corpus methods to support language learning.
You’ll engage with real corpus tools and resources to support student engagement and learning outcomes. Whether you're preparing to teach English or another language, or to develop educational content, this course provides highly transferable skills in the development of teaching resources, learner needs analysis and digital pedagogy — making it ideal for educators, materials writers, and anyone interested in innovative, evidence-based teaching.
This course usually runs between January and March in Term 2.
This course introduces essential concepts and techniques in corpus data analysis, giving you the confidence to apply quantitative methods in your own research. Tailored for language analysts, it focuses on real-world applications of research methods and statistics —from measuring word frequency and diversity to testing hypotheses using chi-squared, t-tests, ANOVA, regression and more.
You’ll also explore the statistics behind collocations and keyword analysis and learn how to assess reliability in coding and annotation. Through hands-on sessions, you’ll gain experience with techniques such as cluster and factor analysis, bootstrapping and non-parametric testing. A key focus is on making your data meaningful and accessible through effective visualisation and presentation—valuable skills for both academic research and professional communication. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to carry out your own statistical analyses and clearly present findings in research reports, research articles or applied projects.
This course usually runs between April and June in Term 3.
Gain a hands-on introduction to corpus linguistics, as this course dives into this essential area of modern language research. You will learn how to analyse large collections of real-world language using key techniques such as concordance analysis, wordlists, n-grams, keyword identification and collocation networks.
Working with #LancsBox, a powerful corpus analysis tool developed at Â鶹ֱ²¥ and used by researchers world-wide, you will gain practical skills in analysing and visualising word patterns, sampling language data and uncovering meaningful linguistic trends. The course explores how these methods are applied in sociolinguistics, discourse studies and applied linguistics, giving you a solid foundation in both theory and application.
By the end of the course, you'll be able to carry out your own corpus-based investigations and critically evaluate research using corpus techniques — gaining transferable skills relevant to careers in research, education, media and tech-driven language analysis.
This course usually runs between October and December in Term 1.
This course explores how corpus methods can be used to investigate real-world discourse—across news, healthcare, social media and beyond. Rooted in Â鶹ֱ²¥’s long-standing tradition of corpus-based discourse studies, it combines hands-on analytical skills with a critical understanding of language in society. You’ll examine how discourse shapes and reflects social realities, using corpora to uncover patterns in media narratives, gender representation, online interactions and more.
Topics include key theoretical frameworks, the role of corpora in discourse analysis, and applied domains such as forensic linguistics and literary studies. You’ll gain experience using corpora to answer discourse-related research questions, analyse power and ideology in text, and write up discourse findings in a structured and impactful way. By the end of the course, you’ll be equipped to critically analyse language in its social context — thus gaining skills transferable to academic research, policy, media, and communication industries.
This course usually runs between January and March in Term 2.
Corpus Based Grammar and Vocabulary is not available from 2027/28 onwards
Corpus Based Grammar and Vocabulary offers corpus based description of the grammar and lexicon of the English language. It guides you through grammatical, lexical and lexicogrammatical patterns observed in large general corpora, provides relevant terminology and teaches you how to describe words and grammatical structures.
This course usually runs between October and December in Term 1.
This course is 20 Credits.
Language Testing courses
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Familiarise yourself with the ways in which language tests and their components are developed and evaluated in this exciting course.
Starting with an overview of basic concepts and principles in language testing, you will then consider how language constructs – what we seek to measure – are defined, and how they may be realised in test tasks. It reviews a variety of common contemporary testing techniques and formats and it addresses current challenges for language test design, relating to developments in technology (e.g., how to utilise generative artificial intelligence) and to improved understanding from the field of second language acquisition of how languages are learnt.
We aim to help you to design language tests, and to evaluate test items critically, through the application and interpretation of descriptive statistics.
This course usually runs between October and December in Term 1.
This course considers a range of current issues in the field of language testing. We aim to help you to explore recent developments in validation research, to understand the theory that underlies frequently debated topics, and to discuss critically key topics in language testing.
We seek to connect the field of language testing and assessment to related disciplinary areas and to consider how our field affects and is affected by aspects of modern society. Examples of topics likely to be covered in the course include:
Technological innovations in language testing Assessing interactional competence and pragmatics Testing language for specific purposes Human and automated expert judgement Good practice and ethics Topics are reviewed and supplemented each year so that the most relevant are included.
This course usually runs between April and June in Term 3.
This course will be offered from the 2027/28 academic year onwards.
This course covers methodological and ethical issues central to undertaking research about language, language teaching and language testing. It sets out the knowledge and skills needed to complete independent research successfully in the field of language testing.
We aim to help you to prepare for your MA dissertation project and for similar research work you wish to realise in your professional context. We present a range of case studies illustrating the different kinds of research questions you might want to address across the whole cycle of test development and evaluation and the most appropriate methods of data collection and analysis you might use to answer those questions.
In this way, we exemplify how to follow up on interests you have, and methods you might use in your research. We aim to help you to understand and examine critically the research methods of existing studies in the field of language testing.
This course usually runs between October and December in Term 1.
This course introduces theoretical concepts in statistics and practical statistical methods common in language testing research. We aim to provide you with a range of statistical tools to carry out routine analyses of language test data and to provide foundational knowledge to support the selection of appropriate methods for use in research studies in language testing and assessment.
We further aim to help you develop your general understanding of statistical procedures often reported in research publications in the field, allowing you to review the statistical results presented and to evaluate their interpretation.
Specifically, we will cover common descriptive and inferential (e.g., correlation, t-tests, ANOVA, Chi-Square) statistics as they are applied to language test data, before focusing on Rasch measurement, a commonly used approach in language testing research.
This course usually runs between January and March in Term 2.
The course “Statistical Analysis for Language Testing” carries 20 credits in 2026/27.
How to apply
Contact the department at linguistics@lancaster.ac.uk if you have any questions about the application process or the entry requirements for the short courses (e.g., English language requirements). We will be able to monitor your status and provide relevant information to the University Admissions Teams once you tell us that you have submitted an application.
Taster Session: Corpora as samples of languages
Vaclav Brezina will be looking at the process of building corpora and also at the different corpus types.
