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English language assessment and training for medical professionals
Proficiency in English is crucial for effective and appropriate medical communication and U.K. regulating bodies for nurse and doctor practitioners use standardised tests (such as IELTS, OET, TOEFL) to assess English proficiency of non-UK/EU applicants. The aim of this project is to investigate a corpus of authentic clinical interactions to identify patterns of interaction and…
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‘A fire raging’: Why fire metaphors work well for Covid-19
Covid-19 and metaphors Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, metaphors have been widely used, reflected upon and critiqued as a tool for communicating about the virus and its consequences. There are good reasons for this. Metaphors involve talking and thinking about one thing in terms of another, on the basis of perceived similarities or…
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From careful to careless reporting: The effect of COVID-19 on the representation of Islam and Muslims – Isobelle Clarke
In my current position, funded by the Aziz Foundation, in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University, I am investigating the representation of Muslims and Islam in the UK press. Previous research has revealed the major press representations of Islam and Muslims between 1998 to 2009 and between 2010 to 2014…
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Slavery in the News – Slaves and Slavery in the Liverpool Mercury in the Nineteenth Century – Helen Baker
Last month, Tony McEnery and I completed a study which looked at changes in the representation of slavery in a prominent provincial newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, throughout the nineteenth century. This will appear in the book Time in Languages, Languages in Time (Čermáková et al, forthcoming) which brings together a collection of articles reflecting on…
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Isobelle Clarke Receives Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship
I am so unbelievably pleased to announce that the Research Awards Advisory Committee at the Leverhulme Trust have granted me, Dr. Isobelle Clarke, the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship to conduct my research entitled “Understanding the linguistic repertoires across anti-science narratives” at Lancaster University in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences. Science improves…
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Introductory Blog – Saira Fitzgerald
My name is Saira Fitzgerald and I am a new visiting researcher at CASS. Thanks to Tony McEnery’s incredible help and support, I succeeded in obtaining a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Luckily for me, SSHRC allowed the fellowship to be held outside Canada and CASS agreed to…
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New partnership between the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science and the Sydney Corpus Lab
We’re excited to announce that the University of Sydney, Australia and the University of Lancaster, UK have signed an MOU agreement to work on collaborative research in corpus linguistics. This new partnership builds on existing connections between the newly established Sydney Corpus Lab and the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which was…
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Representing trans people in the UK press – a follow-up study
I do not identify as trans, nor did I carry out this research for profit or because I am an activist. I approached the subject from the position of allowing the data to speak for itself, and the corpus methods I use rely on computational techniques that are unbiased – computer software identifies the most…
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Time to Celebrate: Trinity Lancaster Corpus
On Wednesday 30 October, The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches (CASS) organised a small get-together in its new location, Bailrigg House, to celebrate the research that is being carried out at the centre. Specifically, on this occasion, we wanted to highlight the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a corpus of spoken learner English built in collaboration between…
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Islam in the Media – A new CASS project working with The Aziz Foundation
We are very pleased to announce that in our next CASS project we will be working with The Aziz Foundation to examine representations of Islam in the British press. The project will be led by Tony McEnery (Principal Investigator) with Gavin Brookes as Co-Investigator. We are also delighted to announce that Isobelle Clarke will be…
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.