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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…
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Morphological complexity: How is grammar acquired and how do we measure this?
Vaclav Brezina and Gabriele Pallotti Inflectional morphology has to do with how words change their form to express grammatical meaning. It plays an important role in a number of languages. In these languages, the patterns of word change may for example indicate number and case on nouns, or past, present and future tense on verbs.…
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Introducing a new project with the British Library
Since 2012 the BBC have been working with the British Library to build a collection of intimate conversations from across the UK in the BBC Listening Project. Through its network of local radio stations, and with the help of a travelling recording booth the BBC has captured many conversations of people, who are well known…
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Analysing Corporate Communications
Detecting the structure of annual financial reports and extracting their contents for further corpus analysis has never been easier. The UCREL Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) project and CASS’ Corporate Communications sub-project has now released the CFIE-FRSE Final Report Structure Extractor: A desktop application to detect the structure of UK Annual Reports and extract the…
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.