Over the past twelve months, one million words were recorded at Shannon College of Hotel Management as part of a world class English Profile Project. Three institutions; University of Cambridge, Mary Immaculate College (MIC) and Shannon College of Hotel Management; have been participating in a collaborative research capturing the language used in the context of hotel management by both native speakers of English and non-native speakers. The research has resulted in the establishment of the Cambridge, Limerick and Shannon (CLAS) Corpus.

On October 21st, 2009 the official signing took place at Shannon College, the source of the language data. Speaking on the significance of the project Kate O’Connell, Deputy Director and Registrar of Shannon College said, “This prestigious project is another first for Shannon College of Hotel Management which is the only hotel management college in Ireland and is now the only such college in the world that has been chosen as the setting for a research project of this nature. The learning environment of academic and practical studies combined with professional work placements at Shannon College, makes the college an ideal source of language data. We are proud to be associated with research leaders MIC and University of Cambridge on this current and any future project.”

The project is a three-way collaboration between Cambridge, MIC and Shannon College. Over 100 hours of recordings are being collected by MIC and Shannon College and will be transcribed by Cambridge University to form an electronic database which is referred to as a “Corpus”. This Corpus will then be used for linguistic research and materials design within the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Press.

This ground-breaking research project will produce a detailed set of Reference Level Descriptions for English, which are linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages so as to provide specific criteria for describing what a learner knows at each level of English. The non-native speaker data collected in Shannon will be especially crucial in this benchmarking research.

Concluding the days’ events, Paul Heacock, Publishing Manager with Cambridge University Press, said “It is a pleasure to be here today to help celebrate this milestone, the formalization of a joint research venture that will benefit not only Cambridge University, Shannon College of Hotel Management, and Mary Immaculate College, but also future learners of English throughout the world. Samuel Johnson said, ‘As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he cannot apply will make no man wise’. We are fortunate indeed to be engaged in a project that will provide knowledge we can apply, much to the enrichment of the human race”.

Pictured above: Official Signing of CLAS Agreement

Tags: Research

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