Corpus Linguistics (Distance)

What is the award selection process? The applications will be evaluated by an expert panel. Shortlisted candidates will be invited for a short interview (conducted online). We aim to notify the shortlisted candidates by Monday, 21 August 2023. The provisional dates for the interviews are 24-25 August 2023.

The award: The award will be made on a competitive basis. It will be provided as a reduction from the programme fees in the first year of the study. The award holder will be asked to focus their dissertation project on a corpus-based analysis of the British Council–Lancaster Aptis corpus. All the relevant skills for the corpus analysis will be acquired in the course of the programme, and the research topic will be finalised in consultation with the dissertation supervisor, who will provide appropriate support and guidance throughout the dissertation project.

The British Council–Lancaster Aptis Corpus: This corpus represents an exciting resource for investigating different aspects (e.g., grammatical, lexical, communicative strategies) of language use of L2 English speakers and relating the findings to language testing, language learning or to broader issues in spoken communication. The corpus was developed by the British Council and Lancaster University. It consists of 1,450 transcribed exams from the Speaking component of the Aptis General exam (www.britishcouncil.org/exam/aptis), a major international English examination, developed and administered by the British Council. The corpus contains data from L2 English speakers at four different levels of proficiency (beginner, lower-intermediate, intermediate and advanced) and from three L1 backgrounds: Arabic, Chinese and Spanish.