The School of English has long-established excellence in Applied Linguistics, and is home to a number of leading experts in the field. Research areas include: Stylistics and literary linguistics; Literature and language teaching; Cognitive approaches to literary text study; Cross-cultural pragmatics; International Englishes; language, culture and teacher development; Language and identity; sociolinguistics; Vocabulary description, acquisition and pedagogy; Lexicology; Spoken discourse study; and Corpus linguistics. A PhD in the School of English will comprise mainly independent study, with supervision meetings spread throughout the year. Our Postgraduates are extremely successful in securing academic posts and postdoctoral positions, and a significant number of students who completed their PhDs in the last five years are now in full-time academic posts. The University of Nottingham is consistently named as one of the most targeted universities by Britain's leading graduate employers.