Quality assurance

At the University of Antwerp we ensure the quality of our programmes. Every programme goes through a six-year quality assurance cycle.

In year 3, we review the quality assurance of the programme during the internal process monitoring and control. In 2021 this was done for the Master of Linguistics, the predecessor of the Master of Digital Text Analysis.

A peer review in year 6 concludes this cycle. The study programme conducts a self-reflection has discussions with internal and external experts, and with an independent student. 

On 14 and 15 November 2018 the peer review team visited the Master of Linguistics and decided to confirm its confidence in the programme.

Strengths of the programme

The lecturers have a critical attitude to constantly improving the programme and its position on the higher education market. The study programme stimulates students to follow their interests as much as possible. Therefore at the moment of the peer review three specialisation options were offered in the Master of Linguistics: (1) Language in use (2) Computational psycholinguistics and (3) Digital Text Analysis. In this last option, a bridge is built between linguistics and literary studies.

This important new development of digitisation receives much needed attention in the programme, partly due to the lecturers who are leading experts in digitisation in literature and language studies.

The peer review team concludes that the master's theses are at a good level. All master students of Linguistics can take up a professional or a research internship. The Master of Linguistics is particularly notable for its strong research orientation, which is important to recruit doctoral students.

The Education Committee will further strengthen the internationalisation of the programme by developing structural international partnerships and removing barriers for exchange, such as the burden of administrative formalities and obtaining equivalences for courses taken abroad. The Education Committee is also implementing blended learning. Although students are formally represented in councils and committees, the study programme is committed to further strengthening participation of and communication with students. On the advice of the peer review team, the education committee will reflect critically on how the specialisations in the Dutch spoken Master taal- en letterkunde relate to the specialisation options in the Master Linguistics. It will examine to what extent it is meaningful and useful that both master's programmes and the similar options continue to be offered side by side. In view of increasing student numbers, the education committee will consider setting up an English programme.

The website ‘opleiding in cijfers’ gives you more detailed information about all programmes in Flemish university colleges and universities.