CASS is a centre designed to bring a new method in the study of language - the corpus approach - to a range of social sciences. In doing it provides an insight into the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education. By providing fresh perspectives in such problems, we are helping to develop new approaches to challenging practices such as hate speech both in terms of raising awareness and of informing policy makers and other stakeholders of how such language may be used to wound and offend.
Can we measure if language teaching based on a corpus is actually helpful or better than current teaching? That should have been the research question. The construction of a corpus isn’t really new...