Modern and Medieval Languages
Churchill would be an excellent place for you to study Modern and Medieval Languages (MML). Although much of your teaching would take place in the Faculty, quite a bit of it would also take place in the College, depending on your choice of subjects. For example, intensive native-speaker language work and small-group teaching (‘supervisions’) are often held at Churchill. We are fortunate in having an extremely strong group of teachers at Churchill — dynamic, enthusiastic, and supportive. We have Teaching Fellows in French and German literature and culture, with an affiliated expert in Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. We have regular native-speaker language teachers in French (a Senior Language Teaching Officer), German and Spanish. For subjects areas that we do not cover in-house, we would send you to good, carefully-selected supervisors in other colleges. All Cambridge Colleges work in this way, to ensure that you get a mix of teaching inside and outside your College.
Our students come from very different backgrounds; they have all kinds of different personalities and interests. We give them lots of practical support too: College aims to give financial help to students wishing to follow vacation courses abroad, and a dedicated fund has been established for such support. Our students regularly do extremely well in their degree examinations, with a number of Churchill students featuring at or near the top of the University rankings in recent years. Recent graduates have gone on to a wide range of careers, such as journalism, marketing and finance, teaching, law and the Civil Service, often using their languages with jobs in Europe or elsewhere.
Entry Requirements
Churchill College’s standard A Level offer in Modern and Medieval Languages is A*A*A. For IB, our standard offer is 43 points overall with 777 at Higher Level.
There may be additional subject requirements depending on which languages you would like to study (see below).
Choosing which Language to study
As part of the Modern and Medieval Languages course, you will study two languages. At least one of these must be a continuation of your studies at school (post-qualification).
You can study either:
- Both languages post-qualification; or,
- One language post-qualification, and the other from scratch, i.e., without any experience (ab initio)
For any language you intend study post-qualification, you need A Level/IB Higher Level (or an equivalent qualification) in that language.
For more information on this course, including which languages are available for study, see the University course page: Modern and Medieval Languages, BA (Hons) | Undergraduate Study
If you are taking other qualifications, please see the following University webpage for equivalent entry requirements: Check which qualifications we accept | Undergraduate Study
Admissions Assessment
All Modern and Medieval Languages applicants are required to take an admissions assessment if they are invited to interview.
You can find more information about this assessment on the University webpage: College admission assessments | Undergraduate Study
Written Work
You will need to submit 2 pieces of written work. Ideally, each piece should be 1500 to 2000 words in length. One essay should be in a language you intend to study post-qualification. The other essay should be in another subject, written in English.
For more information on written work, see the University webpage: Written work and portfolios | Undergraduate Study
Director of Studies
Dr Edmund Birch
Dr Ellamae Lepper
Studying MML at Churchill College
If you like learning languages but also want to learn more than just the words, then the Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) course at Cambridge may well be for you. Alongside intensive language study, MML gives you a wide range of opportunities to learn about the culture, literature, cinema, history, philosophy, art and ideas of other countries, or about the nature of language itself (linguistics).
The MML course at Cambridge lasts four years, with the third year spent abroad. The main languages available for study are: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, with Dutch, Modern Greek, Catalan, Polish and Ukrainian as options after the first year. It is also perfectly possible to combine a European language with a classical language, e.g., classical Greek or classical Latin, or with a language from Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, like Arabic.
You would take two languages during the first two years of the degree: some students continue with two languages that they have already studied at A Level (or equivalent) and some continue with one language that they have studied at A Level while starting a new language from scratch / “ab initio” (or one that they have not studied as far as A Level). The chief emphasis in the first year is on developing your language skills, although there are also papers that introduce you to literature, linguistics, film and history, giving you an idea of what you might like to pursue later in the course. During the year abroad and the fourth year, you would choose how to divide your time between the two languages you’re studying. At this stage, you’d have the opportunity to pursue your interests in significant depth, and the wide range of papers on offer would allow you to focus in great detail, for instance, on particular historical periods, cultural movements, critical theory, the body as represented across different media, intellectual history and more besides.
Leaders in world-class scholarship and teaching, academic staff at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics are pioneering researchers in a wide range of fields that include the phenomenon of human language itself, individual European languages and language families, and the literatures, art forms, film, history, and cultures associated with those languages both today and in the past.
We welcome applications to study any of the languages taught in the Faculty. Whatever languages you are studying, the person with whom you would plan and discuss your academic progress would be your College Director of Studies (DoS) in MML. Your DoS will be keen to help you develop to your full potential during your time here: we want to help you find out what courses of study suit you best, what you are most interested in, what you enjoy most, how to build on your natural strengths and how to improve your knowledge and skills as much as possible. We would treat you as an individual rather than expect you to follow the same course of studies as your peers or to improve at the same rate.
Full course details are provided on the Faculty’s Prospective Undergraduates webpage and the University’s Undergraduate Study webpage.
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