As the Yaşar University Department of English Language and Literature, we are proud to play a role in the education and development of a new generation of young critical thinkers.
We aim to equip our students with the analytic and linguistic skills that will not only open up a wide range of employment possibilities for our graduates but also enable them to play an active and critical role in society.
Our students receive extensive instruction in English grammar, speaking skills and academic writing. Moreover, since they spend four years immersed in oral and written discussion and debate in English, they gain advanced proficiency in the use of language in an applied setting. The increasingly globalized nature of modern society demands experts who are not only competent in other languages but also literate in other cultures. Alongside the literature of the British Isles, students in the department have the opportunity to study other Anglophone cultures and to think critically about questions of cultural domination and autonomy in the context of the history of empire and decolonization. The culture and literature of the United States, the question of gender and literature and the connections between literary and visual culture are among fields that our students will have an opportunity to explore.
With our diverse international faculty, we introduce students to a range of possible approaches to the study of literature, but at the core of our pedagogic strategy is the cultivation of close reading skills. In the first two years of our curriculum, students take a number of courses that focus on textual analysis (in fiction, poetry and drama), providing the foundation on which subsequent courses, with their comprehensive historical scope, will build. Emphasizing the development of the fundamental skills of literary interpretation over memorization of factual knowledge, we try from the very first moment that students set in the classroom at Yaşar University to inculcate the value of independent thought. The option of studying another discipline as a Second Major or Minor as well as the possibility of participating in international exchanges via the Erasmus Program and studying a wide range of other languages represent further opportunities for students independently to shape their intellectual development while registered in the Department.
With the critical, analytic and linguistic skills cultivated by their studies, graduates from our department have a wide range of employment options open to them. Many of them will in turn become educators. Others will use their cultural skills in publishing, journalism and the media. Tourism, public relations, international business and communication are just a few of the other fields open to those who benefit from the comprehensive cultural and intellectual formation offered by our well-rounded curriculum.
