Program Overview

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English (Online) MA

Overview

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.

Specialist Pathways

• 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

Why Choose This Course?

Tailor Your Study

Choose a broad or specialised degree, with flexibility to change along the way.

Ranked 10th

For grade point average among 92 universities, and 7th in the Russell Group. Research Excellence Framework 2021.

Flexible Duration

Most students complete this course in three years, but some choose to take things slower (subject to terms and conditions).

Join the Community

Meet your tutors and fellow students online, and at our annual Summer School in Nottingham.

Study Your Way

Submit assessment types to suit you, from essays and presentations to blog posts and lesson plans.

Flexible Deadlines

Choose your submission points.

Course Content

The course has three phases, each of which is worth 60 credits. For each phase, you will choose six pods of study, which can be taken in any order and at any time. At the end of each phase, you will submit a single portfolio of work for assessment, based on your learning on your selection of pods.

Research Project Option

In your second or third phase, you can choose to complete a large research project (15,000 words or equivalent) such as a traditional dissertation, a practice-based project, extended creative writing, a linguistic experiment and write-up, a multimedia output, and so on. This is the equivalent of six pods, so we call it a ‘hexapod’.

Study Support

You will be allocated a Personal Advisor to support you in planning your studies. Personal Advisors are academic staff from the School of English, all of whom are research and teaching active. Your Advisor will welcome you to the programme, help you decide on your pod choices, and you will stay in touch with them throughout the programme. Our team will support you academically and pastorally, and signpost to more specialist support as required.

Pods

Pods A-C

• Alexander Pope and Eighteenth-Century Contexts
• Approaches to Literary Studies
• Approaches to Victorian Literature
• Calls, Speech, Writing, and Sign Language
• Character
• Cognitive Narratology
• Cognitive Poetics
• Comics and Graphic Novels
• Consciousness in Literature
• Contemporary Creative Critical Writing
• Contemporary Fairy Tale Literature
• Core Concepts in Linguistics
• Core Concepts in Professional Communication
• Core Concepts in Second Language Acquisition
• Core Concepts in Vocabulary Studies
• Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis
• Research Methods: Corpus Linguistics
• Corpus Stylistics
• Correspondence in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pods D-F

• Data Analysis Using R
• Data Visualisation Using R
• Death and Dying in Late Medieval Literature
• Dialect in Literature
• Digital Professional Communication
• Digital Storytelling
• Discourse Analysis
• Early Medieval Women and Literature
• Ecocriticism
• English Field-Names
• English Language Teaching Methodology
• English Medium Instruction
• Ethical Criticism
• Factors in Second Language Acquisition
• Feminist Stylistics
• Fictional Naming
• Forensic Linguistics

Pods G-I

• Gothic Literature
• Healthcare Narratives
• Hexapod
• Historical Pragmatics
• History of English
• Homer in Modern and Contemporary Literature
• Indian Literature of the Twentieth Century
• Intercultural Competence in Context
• Interlanguage Pragmatics
• Investigating Given Names

Pods J-L

• Language and Gender in Professional Communication
• Language, Health, and Illness
• 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

• Media and Political Discourse
• Medieval Geographies
• Metamodernism and Contemporary British Fiction
• Metaphor
• Modernism and D.H. Lawrence
• The Modernist Short Story
• Motivation and Language Learning
• Mysteries and Morality on the Medieval Stage
• Names and Language Change
• Narratology
• Old English Elegies
• 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
• Processing Sentences and Discourse
• Processing Sounds and Meaning
• Professional Communication in the Globalised World
• 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
• Romantic Poetry
• Runes and Runic Inscriptions

Pods S-U

• Sagas of Icelanders
• Saints and Heroes in Old English Poetry
• Science Fiction
• Shakespeare and Text
• Southeast Asian Literature
• Speculative Fictions
• 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 Fiction
• Writing Poetry
• Writing Specialist Fiction

Learning and Assessment

How You Will Learn

This programme is designed to offer completely flexible distance learning, so you can study whenever and wherever you need. Our online course content runs through a fully responsive platform, so you can access your materials across devices.

There is no timetabled teaching, so you will learn independently from the online pod materials, supported by a curated reading and resource list, a variety of online discussion spaces, and one-to-one support from your Pod Tutor.

How You Will Be Assessed

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

Entry Requirements

Undergraduate Degree

Typically 2:1 or above, but we will consider 2:2 (or international equivalent), in any Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences subject. If you have other qualifications or professional experience, please contact us. We consider individual cases, including non-standard qualifications.

International and EU Equivalents

We accept a wide range of qualifications from all over the world.

English Language Requirements

IELTS 6.5 (no less than 6.0 in each element)

Fees

Qualification

MA	Home / UK	International
Fees	To be confirmed	To be confirmed

Please note that course fees for 2026 entry have not yet been confirmed. For reference, you can view the 2025 entry fees here. These may be subject to change for future academic years.

Additional Costs

All students will need at least one device to approve security access requests via Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). We also recommend students have a suitable laptop to work both on and off-campus. For more information, please check the equipment advice.

Funding

Distance Learning Fees

Distance learning students are charged a standard fee, with no differentiation between UK/EU and international students.

Fees are paid on a pod-by-pod basis. We offer a flexible payment plan, so you can choose to pay for a block of pods at a time, or all of your pods up-front, as preferred.

Careers

Careers Advice

We offer individual careers support for all postgraduate students.

Expert staff can help you research career options and job vacancies, build your CV or résumé, develop your interview skills and meet employers.

Each year 1,100 employers advertise graduate jobs and internships through our online vacancy service. We host regular careers fairs, including specialist fairs for different sectors.

International students who complete an eligible degree programme in the UK on a student visa can apply to stay and work in the UK after their course under the Graduate immigration route. Eligible courses at the University of Nottingham include bachelors, masters and research degrees, and PGCE courses.

Graduate Destinations

This course will develop your ability to research and process a large amount of information quickly, and to present the results of your research in an articulate and effective way across a range of platforms and outputs.

In your assessments, you will produce work directly connected to careers in teaching, business and communications, digital and creative industries, the media and publishing, policy and more. You will also be well prepared if you are considering a PhD, or a career in academia.