Studying for your PhD in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies means that you'll become an expert in a specialist area and develop high-quality research skills, which will prepare you for further research projects in addition to pursuing specialist career paths. As a postgraduate researcher, you'll conduct original research work under the guidance of your supervisors. You'll have regular meetings to monitor your progress and develop an initial training plan to make sure you are acquiring the appropriate skills for your research. Your initial priority is refining a research plan and establishing a feasible timescale for your project. During the early part of your PhD, you'll undertake a range of research methods modules to support your research activities. For your first year (or 18 months if you are part-time) you'll be enrolled as a provisional postgraduate reseaarcher, you'll develop a detailed research proposal and write a literature review. This work is submitted to a panel of examiners who will assess it and provide you with feedback and advice on the progress of your research. This is called 'transfer' which is an important means of monitoring the progress of your work and assessing whether your proposal has enough weight to be accurately explored through a PhD research path. After successful transfer, you'll enrol as a full postgraduate researcher, complete your research and write a thesis of approximately 100,000 words. The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is awarded on the basis of this thesis, and your viva voce, where you'll present and discuss the rationale, methods and findings of your original study with an examining panel.<br><br>Our active approach to classroom research encourages everyone who is teaching language to engage in research, whether at a more informal reflective level or the more formal publishable level. This means there's a rich culture of scholarship in our School, and a large range of projects. While there are projects which focus within one language, most projects ask questions which are not necessarily restricted to one particular language. Another feature of our cross-language approach to research in language teaching is that most of our projects involve teams of colleagues. Research and scholarship projects within the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies aim to not only improve language learning for the diverse range of students in the school but also to influence language education policies and practices across the sector. We also work closely with the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence where a number of LCS staff have been awarded secondments to pursue teaching research interests.