Course summary

This one year Forensic Linguistic masters course is designed to help linguistics students take their studies to the next level and enter the exciting discipline of forensic linguistics. Alongside advanced language description modules, you will learn about legal and forensic contexts, and how linguists critically engage with the language of law and provide linguistic evidence in a variety of legal contexts. What you’ll learn The Forensic Linguistics MA course aims to improve your linguistic skills and understanding so that you can apply them to forensic texts and in forensic legal contexts. You will learn from some of the world’s leading academics in the field of forensic linguistics, based at our research institute - the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. There is a strong ethos throughout this programme of forensic linguistics as an application of linguistics. You will study and improve your knowledge and abilities in the linguistic analysis of spoken and written language, in contexts such as police interviews and courtroom interactions and you will learn how linguists apply their methods to aid investigations and provide evidence in court. The course has strong links with the police so you will get unique access to real-world data for your teaching and research work. Our course is applied in nature, giving you a chance to gain valuable hands-on experiences involving real forensic and legal data includes practical project work as well as academic essay assessments. Successfully completing the taught parts of the course will enable you to progress onto completing a 15,000 word research dissertation as the final part of the course. Dissertation projects allow students to research an area in depth and, is excellent grounding for a PhD or for employment beyond the programme.