On the 3rd of July, we were delighted to welcome teachers and students studying A Level English Language at the A-level conference organised by the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. During the conference, we organised two corpus workshops – one for the students and one for the teachers. The corpus workshop organised for students gave them the opportunity to use corpus methods to explore current English use; the corpus workshop for the teachers demonstrated two resources that can be used with A-level students both in everyday classroom activities as well as for their independent linguistic projects. In the two workshops, participants worked with two corpus-based resources developed by our Lancaster team:

• #LancsBox – a user-friendly software that allows students to load and analyse their own mini-corpus. This can be useful for their independent language investigations.
• BNClab – a platform that allows students explore (transcribed) spoken English through two major corpora of British English – the British National Corpus and the British National Corpus 2014.