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Statistics in (Higher) Education: A few thoughts at the beginning of the new academic year
As every year around this time, university campuses are buzzing with students who are starting their studies or returning to the campus after the summer break – this incredible transformation pours life into buildings – empty spaces become lecture theatres, seminar rooms and labs. Students have the opportunity to learn many new things about the subject…
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Introductory Blog – Gavin Brookes
This is the second time I have been a part of CASS, which means that this is the second time I’ve written one of these introductory blog pieces. I first worked in CASS in 2016, on an eight-month project with Paul Baker where we looked at the feedback that patients gave about the NHS in England.…
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ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship: The psychological validity of non-adjacent collocations
Having recently completed my PhD in CASS, I am really excited to announce that I have been awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for the upcoming academic year. My research focuses on finding neurophysiological evidence for the existence of collocations, i.e. sequences of two or more words where the words are statistically highly likely to occur…
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Compiling a trilingual corpus to examine the political and social representation(s) of ‘people’ and ‘democracy’
As a visiting researcher at CASS (coming from the University of Athens, where I am Associate Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Translation), since mid-October 2017 and until the end of August 2018, my research aim is to investigate critical aspects of populist discourses in Europe and their variation, especially during and after the 2008 financial…
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Is Academic Writing Becoming More Colloquial?
Have you noticed that academic writing in books and journals seems less formal than it used to? Preliminary data from the Written BNC2014 shows that you may be right! Some early data from the academic journals and academic books sections of the new corpus has been analysed to find out whether academic writing has become…
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British National Corpus 2014: A sociolinguistic book is out
Have you ever wondered what real spoken English looks like? Have you ever asked the question of whether people from different backgrounds (based on gender, age, social class etc.) use language differently? Have you ever thought it would be interesting to investigate how much English has changed over the last twenty years? All these questions…
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Learn about the BNC2014, scan a book sample and contribute to the corpus…
On Saturday 12 May 2018, CASS hosted a small training event at Lancaster University for a group of participants, who came from different universities in the UK. We talked about the BNC2014 project and discussed both the theoretical underpinnings as well as the practicalities of corpus design and compilation. Slides from the event are available…
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Media delusions: the (mis)representation of people with schizophrenia in 9 U.K. national newspapers between 2000 and 2015
In 2006, The Independent published an article advertising to its readers some of the islands off the coast of New Zealand as ideal holiday destinations. Amongst descriptions of various idyllic landscapes, cultural eccentricities and tourist attractions, the author warns readers of some of the local fauna:    “Wildlife-wise, there are not just hammerhead sharks in these…
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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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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…
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.