Description Admission Requirements Courses Dissertation PhD Exams Proposed Timeline
Our applied linguistics PhD concentration is shaped by our departmental location, our faculty expertise, and our access to other resources within the University of Alabama. Our location in an English Department provides opportunities for research on second language writing through our involvement in the teaching of first-year composition, while our MA-TESOL Program, with its collaboration with the English Language Institute on campus, provides opportunities for research in an intensive language program context. Other programs within the English Department (the Literature PhD, the Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, the Rhetoric and Composition program, and the MFA program), expand possibilities for graduate study into stylistics, rhetoric and composition, and literacy issues. Our faculty expertise (see our individual faculty pages) includes spoken language prosody, cross-cultural communication, issues in language teaching methodology, World English, pragmatics and discourse analysis, issues of language and identity, language policy, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. In terms of the wider university, our collaboration in applied linguistics with colleagues in Modern Languages and Classics offers further possibilities for study. Linguists in other departments also offer courses that can form part of an individualized plan of study (Anthropology, Education, Communicative Disorders, Communication Studies).
Because we are a small program, we must necessarily be very selective in our admissions. We encourage applicants to consider carefully what we have to offer and apply only if they see a good fit between their interests and our faculty expertise. We pay special attention to the statement of purpose.