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Triangulating findings from a corpus-based study: An interview with Adil Ray (creator of Citizen Khan)
My doctoral thesis investigated the ‘Construction of Identities in the BBC Sitcom Citizen Khan’ by analysing a corpus of over 40,000 words, which consisted of transcripts from all the episodes of the show within the first two seasons. In my analysis, there were a number of instances where I had made some assumptions in relation…
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Media delusions: the (mis)representation of people with schizophrenia in 9 U.K. national newspapers between 2000 and 2015
In 2006, The Independent published an article advertising to its readers some of the islands off the coast of New Zealand as ideal holiday destinations. Amongst descriptions of various idyllic landscapes, cultural eccentricities and tourist attractions, the author warns readers of some of the local fauna:    “Wildlife-wise, there are not just hammerhead sharks in these…
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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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Introducing Visiting Researcher Ioannis Saridakis
Starting from Translation Studies, as both an academic discipline and a professional practice in the early 90s, I soon embarked on the then innovative field of corpus linguistics and started exploring its links with, and applicability in, translation and interpreting studies. Soon after finishing my PhD in Corpus Linguistics, Translation and Terminology in 1999, and having…
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Texts and Images of Austerity: Workshop in Erlangen, Germany
On Sunday 24th September, a few of us from CASS travelled to the small Bavarian city of Erlangen, Germany, to attend ‘Texts and Images of Austerity in Britain’, a five-day workshop being held at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität. Our number included Deputy Director of CASS Andrew Hardie, Olivia Ha, Craig Evans, and former CASS member Laura Paterson (now…
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Sketch Engine and other tools for language analysis
Here’s some good news for the beginning of the term: all Lancaster University staff and students have now access to Sketch Engine, an online tool for the analysis of linguistic data. Sketch Engine is used by major publishers (CUP, OUP, Macmillan, etc.) to produce dictionaries and grammar books. It can also be used for a…
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My experience with the Corpus MOOC
Lancaster University’s MOOC in Corpus Linguistics has been hugely important to me during my doctoral research and I’ve taken it each year since it was first offered in 2014. This is not because I’m an especially slow learner or that I was unsuccessful in all of my previous attempts – it’s because the course has…
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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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CASS at Corpus Linguistics 2017
The biennial Corpus Linguistics conference first took place in 2001 at Lancaster, with the 2017 conference at Birmingham being its 9th outing. Lasting four days with an additional day for workshops, this blog post details CASS participation at the event. On Monday 24th July CASS ran two pre-conference workshops: Vaclav Brezina and Matt Timperley’s workshop…
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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.