Outreach

What does the Outreach Team do?

The Outreach Team at the University of York is dedicated to spreading awareness and understanding of language learning and linguistics and how they are studied here at York.

We do this by organising visits to and from surrounding schools, offering talks, small lectures and languages and linguistics based activities.

What do we offer?

Modern Foreign Languages Activities:

Language Taster Sessions - Introduce students to a new language and culture.
We offer: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese
Bespoke activities, tailored to your needs, including: cultural events, revision sessions, and talks on careers.

Linguistics Activities:

Phonetics - Understanding the vocal tract and how sounds are produced
Syntax - How word order varies across languages, and why
Semantics - The Mass/Count distinction and how we count things
History of English - Figuring out the etymology of some selected English words
Psycholinguistics - Experiencing audio delay, and how this can affect our speech

Student Life Talks:

Student-led talks about life at university, with topics ranging from our courses to student societies and living away from home.

School Visits

The Outreach Team offers two different types of school visits: back-to-school visits and outreach visits.

In the back-to-school visits, a current student contacts their old school and arranges to return and talk about their experience at York. As these are very personal connections between the student and their former school, the content of the visits can differ dramatically, from talking about specific linguistic topics to life experiences at uni!

For our outreach visits, our staff and/or PhD students typically visit schools in the area, offering a language/linguistics session that ties in with current A level English Language or Modern Foreign Language studies, most often in the areas of Language Acquisition or Language Change, though we are happy to talk about other topics too. Alongside teaching, we also offer general talks about university life, led by a current University of York student.

Campus Visits

We are happy to accommodate visits from schools where we can provide on-location classes, talks and/or activities that cover general and specific topics in languages and linguistics.

Get involved

If you are:

a current student who wants to visit their old school
a representative of a school/college

...and you would like to get involved, please email us for more information!