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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…
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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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Further Trinity Lancaster Corpus research: Examiner strategies
This month saw a further development in the corpus analyses: the examiners. Let me introduce myself, my name is Cathy Taylor and I’m responsible for examiner training at Trinity and was very pleased to be asked to do some corpus research into the strategies the examiners use when communicating with the test takers. In the…
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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…
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From Corpus to Classroom 2
There is great delight that the Trinity Lancaster Corpus is providing so much interesting data that can be used to enhance communicative competences in the classroom. From Corpus to Classroom 1 described some of these findings. But how exactly do we go about ‘translating’ this for classroom use so that it can be used by…
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Syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
We are proud to announce collaboration with Markus Dickinson and Paul Richards from the Department of Linguistics, Indiana University on a project that will analyse syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. The focus of the project is to develop a syntactic annotation scheme of spoken learner language and apply this scheme to the Trinity…
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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…
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.