The summer school in corpus linguistics for language testing and assessment is aimed at students, researchers, teachers and testers who are interested in the use of language corpora for informing language testing and assessment.  The summer school focuses on different topics in language testing and combines this with training in using corpus methods that can be applied to different areas of language testing and assessment. The programme consists of a series of intensive sessions, involving lectures and practical sessions in which participants learn about key topics in language testing and assessment (such as language use in the real world, assessment of oral and written skills, assessment of pragmatic and interactional competence, development of teaching materials to support language acquisition and test preparation) and also acquire a practical set of skills in corpus-assisted language assessment and corpus methods more generally.

The topics include, for example:

• Corpus-based methods in language test development
• Corpus-based methods for validation
• Corpus methods in analysing target language use
• Building and analysing own corpora
• Introduction to corpus statistics
• Analysing and visualising collocations
• Corpus methods in analysing learner language
• Developing wordlists

The sessions will be taught by the following speakers: Prof Vaclav Brezina,  Prof Tineke Brunfaut, Dr Dana Gablasova, Prof Luke Harding and Dr John Pill.

For information about venue, dates, contact details and how to apply, visit our main page.

This summer school takes place under the aegis of the Department of Linguistics and English Language (LAEL) and The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which is the recipient of The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. CASS is investigating the use of language related to important social topics such as healthcare, poverty, hate crime and language learning.