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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…
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CASS Guided Reading project presented to The Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading (SSSR)
In mid-July, it was my pleasure to represent CASS at the SSSR conference in Novia Scotia, Canada! Over 400 professionals attended, including language and literacy researchers, school teachers, and speech and language therapists. My primary aim was to demonstrate how our CASS language development project is using corpus search methods to identify the effectiveness of…
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User Involvement: CASS go to CLARIN PLUS workshop
At the beginning of June, I attended the CLARIN PLUS workshop on User Involvement held in the capital Helsinki. CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure”; it is an international research infrastructure which provides scholars in the social sciences and humanities with easy access to digital language data, and also advanced tools to…
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Spoken BNC2014 Symposium
On the afternoon of Monday 26th June, CASS hosted a special symposium to celebrate the upcoming public launch of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 – a corpus which members of CASS and Cambridge University Press have spent the last three years compiling. More than fifty guests attended, representing a mixture of Lancaster Summer Schools…
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More on drought: The ENDOWS project
We are thrilled to announce that our latest bid was successful – ENDOWS: ENgaging diverse stakeholders and publics with outputs from the UK DrOught and Water Scarcity programme. The ENDOWS project will capitalise on the outcomes from four existing projects within NERC’s UK Drought and Water Scarcity programme (Historic Droughts, DRY, MaRIUS and IMPETUS) to…
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CASS go to ICAME38!
Researchers from CASS recently attended the ICAME38 conference at Charles University in Prague. Luckily, we arrived in Prague a day early which gave us plenty of time to explore the city. The weather was sunny, so we walked to Wenceslas Square, and then took the lift to the top of the Old Town Hall Tower…
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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…
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Corpus-based insights into spoken L2 English: Introducing eight projects that use the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
In November 2016, we announced the Early Data Grant Scheme in which researchers could apply for access to the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC) before its official release in 2018. The Early Data subset of the corpus contains 2.83 million words from 1,244 L2 speakers. The Trinity Lancaster Corpus project is a product of an ongoing…
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.