Curriculum

The course is aimed at international student activity in forensic language. Students gain an expert knowledge of linguistic, text attribution, video, and sound examinations. Students also learn about the legislative basis of forensic activity. This course enables graduates to pursue employment in the government (Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice) and non-state expert organizations.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to a range of approaches within the field of language planning and security and to link these with a variety of practical implications. More specifically, this course provides students with an awareness and understanding of the importance of three inter-related but independent components: (1) actual practice, (2) beliefs and values, and (3) language management. Students will critically engage with theoretical considerations of language rights, security, nationalism, standardisation, ideology, and language endangerment. The impact of language policy in micro and macro contexts will also be addressed, with regional, educational, institutional, national, and transnational perspectives.

As for learning objectives, the students will be guided towards in-depth reading and given the opportunity to develop their analytical skills and synthesise theoretical and methodological issues. Students will also engage in research on language planning and security, including data collection, analysis, and presentation.

By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate a broad understanding of the main issues in language-based security, as well as the complex factors that go into language planning decisions at the local, national, and international levels.

The course contains the following topics: globalization from a linguistic point of view, types and theories of language planning, the steps and procedures involved in language planning, minorities as a linguistic problem, national and international law in the field of language policy, professional discourse in multilingual settings: policies and practice, and the key concepts in security research: securitization, state, borders, and surveillance.

The course introduces students to the theoretical foundations and applied aspects of formal modeling in linguistics. The first part of the course is theoretical. It is meant to familiarize students with both linguistic and non-linguistics background with the general issues of linguistics methodology, the history and state-of-the-art of structural macro-paradigm in linguistics and the formal apparatus of linguistic analysis. The second, practice-oriented part of the course provides students with the applied skills of formal modeling in syntax. Students learn about the possibility of using formal modeling in machine learning, automated text analysis and
 corpus linguistics. The course is taught in the 1st module of the 1st year of studies. The skills obtained within the framework of the course are important prerequisites for such courses as "Automated Analysis of Natural Language" and the research seminar "Methodology and Research Methods in Applied Linguistics".

The course is aimed at international student activities in the field of text analytics. As a result of the study, all the necessary expert knowledge in the fields of text analysis and computational linguistics will be obtained. The discipline also gives the information about data mining and basics of algorithm, that applied in data analysis. The knowledge taken from this course allow the graduates use some software for data analysis to doing some research and predictive modeling.

At Project Seminar “Digital Projects and Methods for Solving Applied Linguistic Problems in Business” we discuss possible scenarios of running digital projects; applied linguistics and text analytics tasks that arise in companies; the role of linguists in digital transformation of a business and others practical issues.

In this course we will look at how various types of discourse are created using logical, psychological and linguistic methods of persuasion. We will also explore the principles of effective debating. The course focuses on reading and discussing theory and involves practice in speech-making and debating. The course aims at introducing the ways to understand, analyze and create different types of discourse. The expected outcomes of the course include:
•       Understanding the existing analytical approaches to discourse
•       Ability to identify the objectives, the audiences, and circumstances of a speech act
•       Ability to select persuasive verbal means in communication
•       Polemical skills
•       Assessment of the effectiveness of a speech act, depending on the parameters of communicative situation

The course prepares students for doing research work in linguistics and presenting its results in an academic community. The course gives students a clear idea of the structure of linguistic research, its theory and methodological basis, the population and hierarchy of the methods used, and principles of practical material selection. The course also seeks to give practical application to the knowledge obtained from the basic linguistic disciplines.

As the final paper is written and presented in English, the students are familiarised with procedures, models and principles of academic writing, various aspects of rhetoric and composition, conventions of academic communication, etc.

Among the “can dos” we aim to achieve are:

• The ability to work in a research team
• The effective use of technologies for generating ideas
• The ability to produce coherent and logically organised texts of various genres (analytical reviews, articles, reports, course paper synopsis, etc.)
• The ability to critically evaluate texts from the point of view of their academic literacy
• The ability to detect and correct complex syntactic and logical errors
• The ability to participate in academic debates
• The ability to deliver efficient presentations

The course is designed to give students fundamental knowledge of psycholinguistics – a linguistic science studying speech acquisition, comprehension and production processes in their interrelation with the language system. The theoretical part is delivered in the form of lectures and acquaints students with the major Russian and foreign approaches to psycholinguistics. As a result of the course, students will acquire systematic knowledge of the major psycholinguistic theories, become aware of the place of psycholinguistics within a broader scope of linguistic studies, and be able to carry out the psycholinguistic experiment for the purpose of analysing discourse.

The goal of the course is to acquaint students with the methodological apparatus and theoretical basis of formal linguistic modelling, and of the formalised analysis of language structures. The course is of particular relevance in the view of the “digital turn” in humanities, as formal models permit working with language structures as with machine-readable objects and allow of developing automated tools for natural language processing.

The main focus of Research Seminar is in automatic methods and techniques that allow to solve research problems (literature review and network analysis of the scientific field, finding focus statement  and formulating the research problem and choosing corpus technologies, methods of mathematical statistics, data mining for interdisciplinary research).