At Ghent University, we strive to educate people who dare to think about the challenges of tomorrow. For that purpose, we provide education that is embedded in six strategic objectives: Think Broadly, Keep Researching, Cultivate Talent, Contribute, Extend Horizons, Opt for Quality.
Ghent University continuously focuses on quality assurance and quality culture. The Ghent University's quality assurance system offers information on each study programme’s unique selling points, and on its strengths and weaknesses with regard to quality assurance.

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Ghent University's Education Objectives

Quality Assurance at Ghent University

1. Research-oriented: The programme is an excellent preparation for students who want to start a research project (PhD) in the field of linguistics. The students are taught how to carry out an original piece of research work and how to write a scientific article that can be submitted to a scholarly journal.
2. Interuniversity: The Master is a one-year interuniversity programme, organised by Ghent University. The participating Flemish institutions are Ghent University and Catholic University of Leuven (KUL). Students can take courses from both (participating) universities since there is a close cooperation between the universities.
3. Specialisation: Four different areas of specialisation are offered , namely: (i) Linguistics in a Comparative Perspective (at Ghent University), (ii) Natural language processing: Theory and Practice (at Ghent University), (iii) Cognitive and Functional Linguistics and (iiii) Multilingual and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (both at KUL). The students register at the university of choice, based on their preferred area of specialisation.
4. Integration theory and practice: Apart from the general courses and the specialisation courses, the students take an "intensive course", which brings them into contact with current research in their field of specialisation. This intensive course can take several forms: attending seminars, conferences, workshops, winter or summer schools, internship in a research group, etc.
5. Multilingualism: all courses are taught in English, but the student can carry out research in any language. A wide variety of languages is mentioned in the classes, depending on the audience.

1. Internationalisation: Every year foreign students attend the programme with an equivalent diploma (i.e. a linguistics-oriented master) and a good proficiency in English (Toefl test or equivalent). Their presence in the classes allows an exchange between UGent and foreign graduate students.
2. Research supervision: The students carry out original research under the guidance of an experienced researcher. This way the student gets in touch with the supervisor’s research group and with similar research within the same specialisation (e.g. comparative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, etc.).
3. Feedback: The students regularly present their research to their peers during classes, and during an interuniversity meeting, which brings together the students from the three specialisations. This meeting is alternately organised at Ghent or Leuven University. The students deliver a short presentation on the established work for their master’s dissertations and receive feedback from both their peers and (the) supervisors.
4. Methodological tools: The students are familiarised with databases and tools that are necessary for their research, such as language corpora, advanced techniques of corpus analysis, statistics, attendant strategies such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, survey questionnaires, audiovisual recording, experiments, testing, performance measurement, priming, eye-tracking, etc.
5. Personalised education: Thanks to the small number of students the teachers are able to adapt the topics and (the) languages studied in the classes to the students.

1. Research competences: Disparities and gaps in the preliminary training of the students must be identified better from the very start of the academic year. This way students can be provided with solutions to counterbalance these shortcomings (for instance attending courses from the regular master).
2. Student population: The master programme should attract more students both from UGent university and from abroad. The current number of students is too low. Therefore efforts will be made to improve the website, to give the UGent master students more information about the programme , and to send this information to foreign universities.
3. Guidance of foreign students: The incoming students need more guidance with respect to bibliographical tools specific to the UGent, corpora available on Athena, etc.

This study programme is accredited by the Accreditation Organization of the Netherlands and Flanders (in Dutch: NVAO). Accreditation was extended following the positive outcome of the institutional review in 2022.

This information was last updated on 01/02/2023.
In case of questions or suggestions with regard to the publicly available information, please contact the study programme.