The Department of the English Language and Literature was established
in the academic year 1995/1996 in order to participate in providing the
local and regional market with qualified graduates in English. The
Department had been one of the academic
departments of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. However, since 2022,
the Department has become one of the newly established departments of
the Faculty of Foreign Languages
The Department hosts
an undergraduate program that awards a Bachelor’s degree in English
Language and Literature. In addition, it hosts two postgraduate programs
which award a Master’s of Arts degree in Literature and Criticism and a
Master’s of Arts degree in Linguistics.
The
Department aims to equip its students with the necessary skills and
qualifications to enhance their competency in the English language
and its literature. This is essentially attained by its newly-updated
academic plan which familiarizes students with contemporary topics
pertaining to language, literature, translation, and cross-cultural contrastive studies. In addition, the Department acknowledges its duty in maintaining and communicating the message and vision of Al-alBayt the University by supporting cross-cultural tolerance and understanding.
The
Department embraces 18 members of academic staff whose ranks range from
full professor to instructor. The research interests of the academic
staff include phonetics, phonology, prosody, intonation, translation,
sociolinguistics, syntax, morphology, applied and theoretical
linguistics, experimental linguistics, discourse studies, semiotics,
language acquisition, semantics, poetry, prose, drama, literary
criticism, British and American literature, post-colonial literature,
and comparative literature.
The Department looks forward to increasing the number of its academic staff in order to meet the continuous rise in the number of undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in its programs.