Compared to the University of Essex MA courses, the MRes programmes offer more flexibility and fewer taught modules, as the emphasis of the course is on the dissertation and individual research assignments. Students must have a draft research proposal at the application stage, and a supervisor is assigned to them to guide their choice of modules and work on their dissertation.

In this course, students gain familiarity with contemporary work in sociolinguistics and related fields such as conversation analysis, and acquire the theoretical and practical skills to pursue original research. Students cover topics including: quantitative and qualitative methodologies for analyzing sociolinguistic data, interview, questionnaire and observation data, sociocultural factors in language use, and variationist sociolinguistic theory.