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Syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
We are proud to announce collaboration with Markus Dickinson and Paul Richards from the Department of Linguistics, Indiana University on a project that will analyse syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. The focus of the project is to develop a syntactic annotation scheme of spoken learner language and apply this scheme to the Trinity…
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New CASS Briefing now available — How to communicate successfully in English?
How to communicate successfully in English? An exploration of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. Many speakers use English as their non-native language (L2) to communicate in a variety of situations: at school, at work or in other everyday situations. As well as needing to master the grammar and vocabulary of the English language, L2 users of English need to know how to…
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The arrival of the Trinity Lancaster Learner Corpus logo
We at the Trinity Lancaster Learner Corpus team are very pleased to announce that we have a logo for our lovely corpus. We very much hope that it represents the corpus by capturing its key features. We knew we wanted to portray what we feel are the unique aspects of our corpus – interactive L2…
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Trinity Lancaster Corpus at the International ESOL Examiner Training Conference 2015
On Friday 30th January 2015, I gave a talk at the International ESOL Examiner Training Conference 2015 in Stafford. Every year, the Trinity College London, CASS’s research partner, organises a large conference for all their examiners which consists of plenary lectures and individual training sessions. This year, I was invited to speak in front of…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 4: The Question Question
question: (NOUN) A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information. Since we speak in utterances (not sentences), most forms of punctuation are omitted in this corpus of learner language; the exceptions being apostrophes, hyphens and question marks. This blog concerns question marks. (Warning: there are not many jokes!) When we started transcription, the convention seemed…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 3: Clarity
As audio transcribers we listen to sound. Of primary importance is the clarity of the sound. clarity: ABSTRACT NOUN: The quality of being clear (‘easy to perceive, understand, or interpret’), in particular: The quality of being coherent and intelligible The quality of being easy to hear; sharpness of sound The quality of purity Let’s consider…
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Trinity Lancaster Corpus: A glimpse of the future
At Trinity we are totally impressed that our spoken learner corpus is now just over 1.5 million words. Although there are still some quality checks to run, it means we’ve reached that anticipatory moment where we can start digging into the goldmine and seeing what insights the data can offer. We’ve been working closely with…
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Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus: A milestone to celebrate
On Monday 19 May we came together to celebrate the completion of the first part of the Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus project. The transcription of our 2012 dataset is now complete and the corpus comprises 1.5 million running words. The Trinity Lancaster Spoken Learner Corpus represents a balanced sample of learner speech from six…
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Trinity oral test corpus: The first hurdle
At Trinity we are wildly excited – yes, wildly – to finally have our corpus project set up with CASS. It’s a unique opportunity to create a learner corpus of English based on some fairly free flowing L2 language which is not too constrained by the testing context.  All Trinity oral tests are recorded and…
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Vocabulary wordlists designed for learners: Development of the new-GSL
Imagine you have just started learning a new foreign language. Which words do you need to learn first? We all might have some intuitions about this. If the language is English then time – the most frequent noun both in speech and writing – will probably be more useful than say the adjective temporaneous (yes,…
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.