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How to Produce Vocabulary Lists
As part of the Forum discussion in Applied Linguistics, we have formulated some basic principles of corpus-based vocabulary studies and pedagogical wordlist creation and use. These principles can be summarised as follows: Explicitly define the vocabulary construct. Operationalize the vocabulary construct using transparent and replicable criteria. If using corpora, take corpus evidence seriously and avoid…
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Further Trinity Lancaster Corpus research: Examiner strategies
This month saw a further development in the corpus analyses: the examiners. Let me introduce myself, my name is Cathy Taylor and I’m responsible for examiner training at Trinity and was very pleased to be asked to do some corpus research into the strategies the examiners use when communicating with the test takers. In the…
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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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A Journey into Transcription, Part 2: Getting Started
training: MASS VERB: The action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behaviour. So how to begin?  With experts as our guides (and thankfully no animals in sight!)… The Context:  The first week was to be dedicated to training. We began by watching a short video clip of a Trinity examination in…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 1: Our Approach
To Transcribe: VERB: to put (thoughts, speech, or data) into written or printed form origin: mid 16th century (in the sense ‘make a copy in writing’): from Latin transcribere, from trans- ‘across’ + scribere ‘write’ In September 2013 we applied for the post of Audio Transcriber in the CASS Office in the Department of Linguistics…
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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…
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.