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What is corpus stats about? A new book on Statistics in Corpus Linguistics has been published
This practical guide will equip the reader to understand the key principles of statistical thinking and apply these concepts to their own research, without the need for prior statistical knowledge. The book provides step-by-step guidance through the process of statistical analysis and offers multiple examples of how statistical techniques can be used to analyse and…
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British National Corpus 2014: A sociolinguistic book is out
Have you ever wondered what real spoken English looks like? Have you ever asked the question of whether people from different backgrounds (based on gender, age, social class etc.) use language differently? Have you ever thought it would be interesting to investigate how much English has changed over the last twenty years? All these questions…
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CASS: Five more years
We are delighted to announce that CASS has been awarded £2.5 million funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Lancaster University to continue existing activities and pursue a new research programme for five more years, from April 2018 to March 2023. The funding, which includes £750,000 from the ESRC, will be used…
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CASS plays leading role in major European heritage language project
The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science will play a leading role in the new Heritage Language Consortium. The Consortium is a strategic partnership for the study of heritage languages in Europe and involves six leading universities in the UK, Germany and Portugal, as well as the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Through…
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Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics (#LancsSS18)
CASS is pleased to offer three free training events that cover the techniques of corpus linguistics and their application in three different areas. Corpus linguistics for analysis of language, discourse and society Corpus linguistics for language learning, teaching and testing Statistics and data visualisation for corpus linguistics The schools include both lectures and practical sessions that introduce the…
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CASS in the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science
The ESRC Festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of social science research – comprised of a huge array of public events of all kinds, and designed to promote awareness of UK social science research across the board. This year, it runs from 4th to 11th November. As the team at ESRC says, “You may be surprised at just…
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The Spoken BNC2014 is now available!
On behalf of Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, it gives us great pleasure to announce the public release of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The Spoken BNC2014 contains 11.5 million words of transcribed informal British English conversation, recorded by (mainly English) speakers between the years 2012 and 2016. The situational context…
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Change of Leadership in CASS
Andrew Hardie is delighted to announce that he has handed over his role of CASS Centre Director to Elena Semino. Elena has been Head of Department for Lancaster’s Department of Linguistics and English Language for 6 years, and has published widely in the areas of stylistics, metaphor theory, and medical humanities/health communication. In Elena’s own…
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CASS PhD Student Tanjun Liu wins Best Poster Award at EUROCALL2017
In late August, I attended the 25th annual conference of EUROCALL (European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning) at the University of Southampton. This year’s theme encompassed how Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) responds to changing global circumstances, which impact on education. Over 240 sessions were presented covering the topics of computer mediated communication, MOOCs, social networking, corpora, European projects, teacher education,…
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How to Produce Vocabulary Lists
As part of the Forum discussion in Applied Linguistics, we have formulated some basic principles of corpus-based vocabulary studies and pedagogical wordlist creation and use. These principles can be summarised as follows: Explicitly define the vocabulary construct. Operationalize the vocabulary construct using transparent and replicable criteria. If using corpora, take corpus evidence seriously and avoid…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.