Myself, Róisín, and Gillian were delighted to find out last week that we all passed our MA Language and Linguistics degrees with Distinction. Our degree programme included taking a wide range of modules, followed by two terms spent researching and writing a 25,000 word dissertation. All three of us used this opportunity to conduct pilot or exploratory studies in preparation for our PhD studies, which we are excited to be commencing now! You can see the titles and abstracts of our dissertations below:

Abi Hawtin

Methodological issues in the compilation of written corpora: an exploratory study for Written BNC2014

The Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press have made an agreement to collaborate on the creation of a new, publicly accessible corpus of contemporary British English. The corpus will be called BNC2014, and will have two sub-sections: Spoken BNC2014 and Written BNC2014. BNC2014 aims to be an updated version of BNC1994 which, despite its age, is still used as a proxy for present day English. This dissertation is an exploratory study for Written BNC2014. I aim to address several methodological issues which will arise in the construction of Written BNC2014: balance and representativeness, copyright, and e-language. These issues will be explored, and decisions will be reached about how these issues will be dealt with when construction of the corpus begins.

Róisín Knight

Constructing a corpus of children’s writing for researching creative writing assessment: Methodological issues

In my upcoming PhD project, I wish to explore applications of corpus stylistics to Key Stage 3 creative writing assessment in the UK secondary National Curriculum. In order to carry out this research, it is necessary to have access to a corpus of Key Stage 3 students’ writing that has been marked using the National Curriculum criteria. Prior to this MA project, no corpus fulfilled all of these criteria.

This dissertation explores the methodological issues surrounding the construction of such a corpus by achieving three aims. Firstly, all of the design decisions required to construct the corpus are made, and justified. These decisions relate to the three main aspects of the corpus construction: corpus design; transcription; metadata, textual markup and annotation. Secondly, the methodological problems relating to these design decisions are discussed. It is argued that, although several problems exist, the majority can be overcome or mitigated in some way. The impact of problems that cannot be overcome is fairly limited. Thirdly, these design decisions are implemented, through undertaking the construction of the corpus, so far as was possible within the limited time restraints of the project.

Gillian Smith

Using Corpus Methods to Identify Scaffolding in Special Education Needs (SEN) Classrooms

Much research addresses teaching methods in Special Education Needs (SEN) classrooms, where language interventions are vital in providing children with developmental language disorders with language and social skills. Research in this field, however, is often limited by its use of small-scale samples and manual analysis. This study aims to address this problem, through applying a corpus-based method to the study of one teaching method, scaffolding, in SEN classrooms. Not only does this provide a large and therefore more representative sample of language use in SEN classrooms, the main body of this dissertation attempts to clarify and demonstrate that corpus methods may be used to search for scaffolding features within the corpus. This study, therefore, presents a systematic and objective way of searching for the linguistic features of scaffolding, namely questions, predictions and repetitions, within a large body of data. In most cases, this was challenging, however, as definitions of features are vague in psychological and educational literature. Hence, I focus on first clarifying linguistic specifications of these features in teacher language, before identifying how these may be searched for within a corpus. This study demonstrates that corpus-based methods can provide new ways of assessing language use in the SEN classroom, allowing systematic, objective searches for teaching methods in a larger body of data.