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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…
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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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Morphological complexity: How is grammar acquired and how do we measure this?
Vaclav Brezina and Gabriele Pallotti Inflectional morphology has to do with how words change their form to express grammatical meaning. It plays an important role in a number of languages. In these languages, the patterns of word change may for example indicate number and case on nouns, or past, present and future tense on verbs.…
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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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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…
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Introducing the CASS Guided Reading Project (Part 1)
In collaboration with the Department of Psychology, CASS is investigating the critical features of guided reading that can benefit the language and literacy skills of typically developing children. What is guided reading? Guided reading is a technique used by teachers to support literacy development. The teacher works with a small group of children, typically not…
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.