British National Corpus (BNC) as a sociolinguistic dataset: Exploring individual and social variation

The project exploits an existing dataset, The British National Corpus (BNC), for the study of informal spoken British English as used by different age and social groups across the UK. In addition, new developments in British English will be investigated by comparing the BNC with BNC2014, a new dataset that is being developed at Lancaster University in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. This allows us, for the first time, to look at language change in spoken British English, on a large scale, over twenty years. By combing methodologies from the fields of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as using novel analytical methods for in-depth exploration of the data, the project will offer new insights into social variation in British English that have previously not been possible. The focus of the sociolinguistic analyses will be on age, an important aspect of everyday social life, that has so far received only limited attention from researchers studying language.

The main contribution of the project is not only to our knowledge of British English but also to enabling future systematic research in this area. The results of the project will be applied in teaching of the English language at secondary schools (AS and A-level) and in ESL/EFL classes to students whose mother tongue is not English. Internationally, there is a growing demand for EFL/ESL teaching, which also represents an important part of British economy. The results of the project will also be disseminated via a free online course (our Corpus Linguistics MOOC) run by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University as well as via different channels of the project partners (project ambassadors). The project has been endorsed by Cambridge University Press, a leading global academic publisher and part of the University of Cambridge, the English and Media Centre, an important educational charity working with secondary teachers of English Language and Media Studies in the UK and abroad and Trinity College London, a major international testing board operating in over 40 countries worldwide.

Our project will have five principal audiences for impact, established researchers in different disciplines, postgraduate researchers, language testers/material developers, non-academics in the UK and non-academics worldwide.
Who - established academics: The proposed research will have interdisciplinary impact. Apart from researchers in sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics, researchers investigating different aspects of British English and society (sociologists, social psychologists, educators etc.) will directly benefit from the findings of the research (see Academic beneficiaries).
How: Age is an important variable in social research especially in connection with the overall aging of society. To maximise impact, an online platform for searching the data and carrying out multi-variate analyses (advanced mode) will be developed. In this way, researchers will be able to test their own hypotheses about language and society using the subset of the BNC developed for the secondary data analysis (see Objectives).
Who - Master's and PhD students and junior researchers from the UK and overseas: who every year participate in free Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics; future cohorts from these summer schools will have an opportunity to engage with the findings of the study and use the techniques in their own research. Since 2011, the summer schools have attracted almost 400 participants from over 15 countries.
How: The Summer school workshops will include training in corpus linguistics and quantitative sociolinguistic techniques using the online platform developed in the project. The participants will be able to use the findings of the study as well as to test their own sociolinguistic hypotheses and include these in their theses/dissertations and academic publications.
Who - language testers/material developers: The project has been supported by three large UK organisations - CUP, EMC and TCL (see Pathways to Impact) which are involved in materials development/language testing.
How: Our impact partners will not only provide channels for the dissemination of the results but will also gain early access to these results. This will allow them to incorporate the findings into their own material development/language testing activities. This will give them an advantage on the competitive international market.
Who - non-academic beneficiaries in the UK: who fall into two groups i) secondary level teachers/students of English Language and ii) teachers/learners of English as a second/foreign language. The sociolinguistic perspective has been given a prominent position in the syllabi and assessment of English Language taught at AS and A-level by several major examination boards. In addition, for the acquisition of English as a second language, the awareness of what language is appropriate/typical for different situations or groups of speakers is very important (see Pathways to Impact).
How: The project will represent a valuable educational resource in both AS and A-level English Language classes as well as ESL/EFL classes through materials and an interactive online platform (simple mode) that will allow teachers and students easy access to sociolinguistic data in a user-friendly manner. The teaching materials will be deposited at the ESRC resources archive Social Science for Schools.
Who - non-academic audiences worldwide: Finally, via our successful free online course (Corpus Linguistics MOOC) the research findings will be disseminated to a large international audience (of academics but also importantly of non-academics). The course has attracted over 30,000 participants worldwide in its three runs in 2014 and 2015.
How: The team will develop a sociolinguistics module which will summarise the findings of the research and allow the audience to actively engage with it. The module will also provide links to the online platform and the teaching materials that will be deposited at the ESRC resources archive.