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The Spoken BNC2014 is now available!
On behalf of Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, it gives us great pleasure to announce the public release of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The Spoken BNC2014 contains 11.5 million words of transcribed informal British English conversation, recorded by (mainly English) speakers between the years 2012 and 2016. The situational context
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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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Change of Leadership in CASS
Andrew Hardie is delighted to announce that he has handed over his role of CASS Centre Director to Elena Semino. Elena has been Head of Department for Lancaster’s Department of Linguistics and English Language for 6 years, and has published widely in the areas of stylistics, metaphor theory, and medical humanities/health communication. In Elena’s own
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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
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.