English (Online) (Taught)

This course lets you develop your specialism and study what you love, without the constraints of a set curriculum.

On this programme, our flexible mini-modules are known as 'pods'. You can choose from a broad range of pods of study, created by subject experts, to build your own programme. Your curriculum will be unique to you, and you can choose to work towards one of our specialist pathways below if you wish:

Applied Linguistics
Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching
Discourse and Communication
English Literature
Language and Linguistics
Literary Linguistics
Medieval Englishes
Modern and Contemporary Literature
Name-Studies
Norse and Viking Studies
Professional Communication
World Literatures
You don't need to commit to a specialism right at the beginning of your studies, although you can if you want to! Your final degree depends on studying at least two-thirds of your course in a specialised area, and you will have regular opportunities to discuss this with your Personal Advisor as you go. Whatever your choices, you will graduate with an MA in English. If your options don’t fit a particular pathway, your degree outcome will be MA English (Applied English).

Most students complete this course in around three years. However, you can adjust your study schedule to best suit your circumstances, with a minimum registration period of two years. Please note, if you are in receipt of a Student Finance England loan, you will be on a three-year completion schedule as standard.

You will begin your course with a free Orientation pod, and will meet your Personal Advisor. This will allow you to create your own study plan and select your first pods. You can work on one pod at a time, or two, or three, or all six at once, if you prefer.

After six pods of study, you submit a portfolio of work that covers all six of your chosen topics. Then you move on to the second phase and take six more pods, and then a final phase of another six pods to complete the MA.

In each of the three phases, you can choose from our full range of pods. There are no compulsory pods or pre-requisites. The list below represents the pod choices currently in our catalogue, and is arranged alphabetically.

Pods A-C
Alexander Pope and Eighteenth-Century Literary Contexts
Approaches to Literary Studies
Approaches to Victorian Literature
Calls, Speech, Writing, and Sign Language
Cognitive Narratology
Cognitive Poetics
Comics and Graphic Novels
Contemporary Fairy Tale Literature
Core Concepts in Linguistics
Core Concepts in Second Language Acquisition
Core Concepts in Vocabulary Studies
Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis
Corpus Stylistics
Correspondence in the Long Nineteenth Century
Culture and Communication
Pods D-F
Death and Dying in Late Medieval Literature
Digital Professional Communication
Discourse Analysis
Early Medieval Women and Literature
Ecocriticism
English Language Teaching Methodology
English Field-Names
Ethical Criticism
Factors in Second Language Acquisition
Pods G-I
Gothic Literature
Healthcare Narratives
Historical Pragmatics
Homer and Modern and Contemporary Literature
Indian Literature of the Twentieth Century
Intercultural Competence in Context
Interlanguage Pragmatics
Pods J-L
The Language of Dystopia
The Language of Multimodal Literature
The Language of Surrealism
The Languages of English Place-Names
Leadership Communication
Learning and Teaching Second Language Vocabulary
Literary Constructions of Madness
Literary Linguistics
The Lyric and its Language in Middle English
Pods M-O
Medieval Geographies
Metamodernism and Contemporary British Fiction
Metaphor
Modernism and D.H. Lawrence
The Modernist Short Story
Narratology
Old English Language
Old Norse Language
Old Norse Mythology
Oscar Wilde and West End Theatre
Pods P-R
Performing Space and Place
Place-Names and the English Landscape
Quantitative Research Methods in Applied Linguistics
The Queens of Crime Fiction
Queer Linguistics
The Reader in Stylistics
Reading and Editing the Medieval Text
The Reading Public in the Romantic Period
Reading the Early Modern Body
Religion and Fantasy Literature
Runes and Runic Inscriptions
Pods S-U
Saints and Heroes in Old English Poetry
Shakespeare and Text
Southeast Asian Literature
Surnames and Identities
Systemic Functional Linguistics
Talk at Work
Teaching And Assessing Second Language Skills
Textual Editing
Text World Theory
Texts in a Digital World
Understanding Performance
Pods V-X
Vampire
Vikings in the East Midlands
Women Poets of the English Civil War
Words and Multiword Units
World Literatures from Theory to Text
World Utopia in the Early Twentieth Century
Writing Poetry
On this MA programme, pods are taken in place of modules and may be subject to change over the duration of the course.

There are no fixed deadlines within each year. Instead, there are three submission points over the year, and your Personal Advisor will help you schedule your portfolio work to submit at the time that suits you.

You will submit a portfolio of work for every six pods that you complete. Guided by your Pod Tutors and Personal Advisor, your portfolio will showcase your strengths and skills relevant to your own life and career. For example, if you currently work in teaching, you could choose to include lesson plans in your portfolio.

You will be assessed by your choice of assessment types, which may include:

Essays
Lesson plans
Syllabus design
Conference papers
Blog posts
Experiment design
Exhibition curation
Video/audio presentations
Journalism
Website design
Creative writing
Performance production