ECTS Credits and Assessment

Earning the credits

To earn 6 ECTS credits you meet two requirements. First, attend at least 50% of all available courses and take an active part in them. Second, complete one assessed piece of work, either a research essay or a poster with a presentation. In both cases your topic should include practical work with diachronic linguistics, using corpora, digital tools, or both.

The research essay

For the essay option, you write an individual essay that develops your topic through practical analysis.

Length

Approximately 3,500 to 4,000 words, excluding references.

Structure

A clear research question, relevant background, analysis of your data or examples, discussion, and a conclusion.

Formatting

12 point type, 1.5 line spacing, standard margins, with pages numbered.

Referencing

The Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics (author, year, page), applied consistently throughout.

Assessment

The clarity of the research question, engagement with relevant work, the quality of the analysis, and accurate referencing.

The poster and presentation

For the poster option, you prepare an academic poster on your topic and present it at the school. The poster sets out your research question, your data or tools, and your main findings. Assessment looks at the clarity of the poster, the quality of the analysis, and how well you present and discuss it.

Agreeing your topic

Please agree your topic in advance with the instructor whose course is most closely related to it, ideally in the first days of the school. If you are not sure which course fits best, write to the coordinator and we will help you choose. Agreeing early leaves you enough time to develop your work well.

Submitting and deadlines

Posters are presented during the school. Essays are sent to the coordinator, Nikolaos Lavidas, as a single PDF by email, and the coordinator arranges the assessment with the relevant instructor. You may submit your essay by the end of the school to receive your result soon afterwards, or by the end of September to receive it by the end of that month.

Certificate and transcript

Once your work has been assessed, the official transcript is issued within about one week. You receive it by email as a signed PDF, and a printed copy can be posted on request.

What the transcript confirms

For your credit transfer, the transcript states the courses you attended, including those focused on diachronic linguistics; the successful completion of your assessed work, whether the research essay or the poster and presentation; your total academic workload of approximately 150 hours; and the award of 6 ECTS credits.