CASS goes to Weihai!

 

China 1

Between the 28th July and the 2nd August, Carmen Dayrell and I represented CASS at the 3rd Sino-UK Summer School of Corpus Linguistics. The summer school was organised by Beijing Foreign Studies University and was hosted at the Weihai campus of the University of Shandong, China. A research symposium followed the summer school on the 3rd August where we presented our research to representatives from both universities. The research symposium gave us a taste of how corpus linguistics is used in a different culture and we heard papers on a range of different topics, such as Alzheimer’s research, work on translations, Chinese medicine, and analyses of media discourse.

Our summer school sessions introduced students to corpus linguistics and gave them an overview of the discipline’s development within a UK context. We also discussed the range of projects ongoing at CASS and foregrounded the interdisciplinary focus of the Centre’s work. After the formal lectures, we ran hands-on sessions demonstrating how to use Graphcoll and CQPweb and conducted seminars using material from the Climate Change and Discourses of Distressed Communities projects to test the students’ frequency, keywords, and concordance analysis skills. The students really engaged with the sessions and were particularly taken with Graphcoll. They enjoyed doing the practical sessions, which they said were different to how they usually learned. Everyone in the classroom worked really hard and asked great questions that showed how interested they were in Lancaster’s tools.

China 2

Weihai is an absolutely beautiful place. The university sits with a sandy beach on one side and a mountain on the other. Because of this, Weihai campus is considered to have good Fung Shui. The place itself was described as a small city by those who live here, but ‘small’ is relative when compared to cities the size of Lancaster. Carmen and I enjoyed our time in China (despite a long journey involving flight cancellations and a trip to a Beijing hotel in the middle of the night) and loved seeing how well the students took to corpus linguistics and the materials that we prepared for them. The trip was a great success and we look forward to future collaborations between Lancaster and Beijing Foreign Studies University.

China 3

Workshop on Corpus Linguistics in Ghana

Back in 2014, a team from CASS ran a well-received introductory workshop on Corpus Linguistics in Accra, Ghana – a country where Lancaster University has a number of longstanding academic partnerships and has recently established a campus.

We’re pleased to announce that in February of this year, we will be returning to Ghana and running two more introductory one-day events. Both events are free to attend, each consisting of a series of introductory lectures and practical sessions on topics in corpus linguistics and the use of corpus tools.

Since the 2014 workshop was attended by some participants from a long way away, this time we are running events in two different locations in Ghana. The first workshop, on Tuesday 23rd February 2016, will be in Cape Coast, organised jointly with the University of Cape Coast: click this link for details. The second workshop, on  Friday 26th February 2016, will be in Legon (nr. Accra), organised jointly with the University of Ghana: click this link for details. The same material will be covered at both workshops.

The workshop in 2014 was built largely around the use of our online corpus tools, particularly CQPweb. In the 2016 events, we’re going to focus instead on a pair of programs that you can run on your own computer to analyse your own data: AntConc and GraphColl. For that reason we will be encouraging participants who have their own corpora to bring them along to analyse in the workshop. These can be in any language – not just English! Don’t worry however – we will also provide sample datasets that participants who don’t have their own data can work with.

We invite anyone in Ghana who wants to learn more about the versatile methodology for language analysis that is corpus linguistics to attend! While the events are free, registration in advance is required, as places are limited.

The heart of the matter …

TLC-LogoHow wonderful it is to get to the inner workings of the creature you helped bring to life! I’ve just spent a week with the wonderful – and superbly helpful – team at CASS devoting time to matters on the Trinity Lancaster Spoken Corpus.

Normally I work from London situated in the very 21st century environment of the web – I plan, discuss and investigate the corpus across the ether with my colleagues in Lancaster. They regularly visit us with updates but the whole ‘system’ – our raison d’etre if you like – sits inside a computer. This, of course, does make for very modern research and allows a much wider circle of access and collaboration. But there is nothing like sitting in the same room as colleagues, especially over the period of a few days, to test ideas, to leap connections and to get the neural pathways really firing.

vaclavdana

It’s been a stimulating week not least because we started with the wonderful GraphColl, a new collocation tool which allows the corpus to come to life before our eyes. As the ‘bubbles’ of lexis chase across the screen searching for their partners, they pulse and bounce. Touching one of them lights up more collocations, revealing the mystery of communication. Getting the number right turns out to be critical in producing meaningful data that we can actually read – too loose and we end up with a density we cannot untangle; the less the better seems to be the key.  It did occur to me that finally language had produced something that could contribute to the Science Picture Library https://www.sciencephoto.com/ where GraphColl images could complement the shots of language activity in the brain. I’ve been experimenting with it this week – digging out question words from part of the corpus to find out how patterned they are – more to come.

We’ve also been able to put more flesh on the bones of an important project developed by Vaclav Brezina – how to make the corpus meaningful for teachers (and students). Although we live in an era where the public benefit of science is rightly foregrounded, it can be hard sometimes to ‘translate’ the science and complexity of the supporting technology so that it is of real value to the very people who created the corpus. Vaclav has been preparing a series of extracts of corpus data that can come full circle back into the classroom by showing teachers and their students the way that language works – not in the textbooks but in real ‘lingua franca’ life. In other words, demonstrating the language that successful learners use to communicate in global contexts. This is going to be turned into a series of teaching materials with the quality and relevance being assured by crowdsourcing teaching activities from the teachers themselves.

time Collocates of time in the GESE interactive task

Meanwhile I am impressed by how far the corpus – this big data – is able to support Trinity by helping to build robust validity arguments for the GESE test.  This is critical in helping Trinity’s core audience – our test takers –  to understand why should I do this test, what will the test demonstrate, what effect will it have on my learning, is it fair?  All in all a very productive week.