A day of talks and discussion on aspects of English grammar, organised in conjunction with the British Library and the University of Oxford.

Are you sat down or sitting down while reading this? Have you got or do you have a preference for one form over the other? English has a number of ways of expressing the same concept, and with approximately 400 million mother-tongue speakers and an estimated 1400 million non-native speakers it has become a diverse, flexible language that continues to adapt, evolve – and provoke strong reactions. You only need to search for #grammar on Twitter to see what we mean!

Recent developments in the National Curriculum for England have placed grammar in schools at centre stage once more, and divided opinion among politicians, teachers, linguists and journalists, as well as the wider public, on how and whether it should be taught. How have teachers implemented changes to their teaching and learning programmes to adapt to the new syllabuses, assessment criteria and tests? What resources are available for students, teachers and the general public to learn more about English grammar, and how reliable are they? What is or should be the role of English grammar teaching in schools today and why is this so controversial? What do teachers, professionals, academics and the general public feel is the cultural and educational significance of knowledge about the language?

Join us at UCL for a day of talks and discussion and feel free to ask our panel of experts to explore any aspect of English grammar from ain’t to innit.

Aims and objectives

Over three days, participants will learn about the following:

• the scope of Corpus Linguistics, and how we can use it to study the English Language;
• key issues in Corpus Linguistics methodology;
• how to use corpora to analyse issues in syntax and semantics;
• basic elements of statistics;
• how to navigate corpora, particularly ICE-GB and DCPSE

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, participants will have:

• acquired a basic but solid knowledge of the terminology, concepts and methodologies used in English Corpus Linguistics;
• had practical experience working with two state-of-the-art corpora and a corpus exploration tool (ICECUP);
• have gained an understanding of the breadth of Corpus Linguistics and the potential application for projects;
• have learned about the fundamental concepts of inferential statistics and their practical application to Corpus Linguistics.