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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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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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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…
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Recent Research into CEO Compensation
On Wednesday 18th January, the CFA Society United Kingdom (CFA UK) hosted a breakfast meeting at Innholders’ Court (London, EC4R 2RH) to discuss findings of a recently completed CFA UK-funded research project examining CEO compensation across the FTSE-350 from 2003 to 2015. CFA UK represents the interests of around 12,000 investment professionals in the UK and the…
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Registration now open for Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics and other Digital Methods!
Registration now open for Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics and other Digital Methods! We are pleased to announce that we will be running our hugely popular summer schools again in 2017! We will be running six free training events that cover the techniques of corpus linguistics, computational analysis of language and geographical information systems. The schools…
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Introducing the CASS Guided Reading Project (Part 2)
In the first blog entry, we noted that there is a substantial variability in our understanding of how guided reading is thought to foster specific literacy skills. Further, we explained how our use of corpus methods will enable us to identify a wide range of teacher strategies used in guided reading. That is a crucial…
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.