Why study languages at Oxford?
Wide range of courses
Immersion in language and literature
Tutorial system
Extensive resources
Careers
Wide range of courses
The faculty is one of the largest in the country, with over a 100 academic staff and a thriving teaching and research community. It offers a wide range of languages - including French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Modern Greek, Czech, Polish and Celtic. Some can be studied on their own, they can all be studied in combination with another language, and almost all of them also jointly with another subject. The subjects include English, Classics, History, Linguistics, Middle Eastern languages and Philosophy.
Immersion in language and literature
The main components of the Modern Languages degree are language and literature.
Language comprises 50% of both first year and final examinations. On graduating, students can expect to speak fluently in colloquial and more formal situations, write essays and translate with accuracy and sensitivity to vocabulary, styles and registers.
The literature element is a key part of the degree, providing an enriching and challenging experience. It provides a context for the language study that broadens your understanding of culture and covers topics such as gender issues, popular culture, theatre studies, aesthetics, anthropology, art history, ethics, history, philosophy, politics, psychology and theology. You can study the literature of a language chronologically or focus on particular periods - the medieval, the early modern or the modern era.
Non-literary subjects are also available in the form of linguistics, philology, advanced translation and film studies.
An essential part of your study is a year abroad in the country of your chosen language(s).
Tutorial system
Tutorials are central to study at Oxford. They give you the chance to discuss your subject with a world leader in the field. Your tutor gives individual support and encourages you to develop your full potential. As well as tutorials in college, students share lectures, classes and practicals in their department, depending on their subject. The Oxford system combines the best of one-to-one or small-group teaching in college with the wealth of resources in the University.
Extensive resources
The Taylor Institution is the University's centre for the study of modern European languages and literatures. Its research library, one of the three central libraries of the University, contains the largest specialist collection in this field in Britain.
The Taylor building also houses the more recent Modern Languages Faculty Library, the main Oxford lending library for Modern Languages undergraduates. The Taylor Institution Library, with a bookstock of around 500,000 volumes, concentrates on the literary and philological aspects of the main European languages (other than English) but also contains a considerable amount of general background material of use to researchers in the fields of history, philosophy and art. Its rare collection includes original texts from the 17th century onwards.
The Slavonic and Modern Greek Library specialise in languages, literature and history and have material in, and about, a range of Slav and Greek languages.
The Language Centre Library has one of the largest collection of materials for language learning in the UK. Currently there are 140 languages but the collection expands every year as new languages are added, often on request. The collection consists of textbooks with audio-visual material; magazines, newspapers and daily recorded news; videos; and CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) on eight open-access computers.