The Graduate Certificate in Applied Linguistics enables professionals to focus and solidify or update their work with language teaching, with applications in the language industry, or with research.  The coursework leading to this certificate grounds the participants in theory and practice, providing linguistic expertise to anyone with related degrees and professional aspirations, and helping to prepare students for work in diverse professions, including:

• Intelligence gathering
• Human-machine interfaces (improving text-to-speech, speech recognition, and integrating language processing and real-world knowledge)
• Profiling
• Data mining
• Therapy
• Standardization of industrial terminology
• Localization of international products for a specific market or culture
• Forensics
• Translation/interpreting

Even in jobs that are not primarily language-oriented, this certificate can help students develop important market skills:

• Increased pragmatic awareness - the skill of recognizing how language works in social contexts, including how different cultures handle verbal behaviors such as requests, negotiations, conventions of politeness, and persuasion.
• Application - the ability to make the connection between theoretical knowledge and putting it to effective use, such as understanding how social power imposes specific constraints on grammar, word choice, and pronunciation.
• Clarity - the mastery of tailoring a message e towards a specific audience with maximum impact, including subliminal techniques (e.g. in advertising).
• Pattern extraction - the knowledge of how to identify and find specific patterns in very large bodies of data.
• Explication - understanding the difference between inductive modeling and deductive hypothesis forming, and the interplay between them.

This certificate is good for students interested in how people are swayed by framing a narrative one way or another, how to prepare materials for adult learners of language, how speech is produced, or how it is learned.  It is also a good complement to several master’s degree programs at UNC Charlotte such as psychology, computer science, or anthropology.