The most frequent response I get when I tell people I do an English Language degree is "But you can already speak English!", a reply that got old so quickly I don't think it was ever young. Whilst I know that all those people were joking, it can sometimes make me feel like they don't see my degree as very serious. English Language as a degree subject is fairly new and most people just have no idea what it involves. So, as this is my last week of lectures for my first year at university, I thought I would give you all an insight into what English Language students actually get up to.

First of all, we don't learn how to speak English, but rather how to analyse it and how to apply this analysis practically. We learn what language actually is and how it's learnt; whether it is an innate capability or something that has to be taught. We learn how politicians and the media can manipulate language and the different ways it can be used to represent people. We learn how dictionaries are put together and how language can be used in forensics. Whilst grammar is a large part of what we learn, it's not simply punctuation, it's morphology (how words are put together) and phonology (the way words are pronounced) too.

So many people seem to think that an English Language degree is ridiculously easy compared to a science or maths degree, but I'd like to see how they'd feel if I gave them a text and asked them to perform a SPOCA analysis and phonemic transcription.