-
Data-driven learning: learning from assessment
The process of converting valuable spoken corpus data into classroom materials is not necessarily straightforward, as a recent project conducted by Trinity College London reveals. One of the buzz words we increasingly hear from teacher trainers in English Language Teaching (ELT) is the use of data-driven learning. This ties in with other contemporary pedagogies, such as discovery learning.  A…
-
TLC and innovation in language testing
One of the objectives of Trinity College London investing in the Trinity Lancaster Spoken Corpus has been to share findings with the language assessment community. The corpus allows us to develop an innovative approach to validating test constructs and offers a window into the exam room so we can see how test takers utilise their…
-
From Corpus to Classroom 1
The Trinity Lancaster Corpus of Spoken Learner English is providing multiple sets of data that can not only be used for validating the quality of our tests but also – and most importantly – to feedback important features of language that can be utilised in the classroom. It is essential that some of our research…
-
The heart of the matter …
How wonderful it is to get to the inner workings of the creature you helped bring to life! I’ve just spent a week with the wonderful – and superbly helpful – team at CASS devoting time to matters on the Trinity Lancaster Spoken Corpus. Normally I work from London situated in the very 21st century…
-
The arrival of the Trinity Lancaster Learner Corpus logo
We at the Trinity Lancaster Learner Corpus team are very pleased to announce that we have a logo for our lovely corpus. We very much hope that it represents the corpus by capturing its key features. We knew we wanted to portray what we feel are the unique aspects of our corpus – interactive L2…
-
Trinity Lancaster Corpus: A glimpse of the future
At Trinity we are totally impressed that our spoken learner corpus is now just over 1.5 million words. Although there are still some quality checks to run, it means we’ve reached that anticipatory moment where we can start digging into the goldmine and seeing what insights the data can offer. We’ve been working closely with…
-
Trinity oral test corpus: The first hurdle
At Trinity we are wildly excited – yes, wildly – to finally have our corpus project set up with CASS. It’s a unique opportunity to create a learner corpus of English based on some fairly free flowing L2 language which is not too constrained by the testing context.  All Trinity oral tests are recorded and…
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.