LTF 2021

LTF 2021 was an online event hosted by Lancaster University on Friday 26th November and Saturday 27th November. The theme of the conference was Language Assessment and (Applied) Linguistics.

The finalised conference programme is available here: LTF-2021-schedule. 

Around 170 people attended the conference.

The opening plenary, the Cyril J. Weir lecture, was delivered by Professor Tony McEnery (Lancaster University), whose talk is titled: What can language assessment learn from learner corpora? The case of pragmatic macrostructures in L2 speech

There was also an invited panel on Saturday 27th November on The future of language constructs with Professor Lynda Taylor (University of Bedfordshire) as discussant, including presentations by:

  • Assoc. Prof. Talia Isaacs (UCL–Institute of Education)
  • Dr Susy Macqueen (Australian National University)
  • Dr Fumiyo Nakatsuhara (University of Bedfordshire).

Networking/social activities

The UKALTA PGR Network held a meeting at lunchtime on Saturday 27th November. The meeting was for postgraduate and early-career researchers who are UKALTA members. It introduced the UKALTA PGR Network and offered opportunities for networking.

Pre-conference workshop

An online pre-conference workshop was led by Dr Dana Gablasova and Dr Vaclav Brezina:

Workshop title: Using #LancsBox in language testing: Corpus approaches to creating wordlists
Convenors: Dr Dana Gablasova and Dr Vaclav Brezina (Lancaster University)
Content: The workshop was designed to:

  • Introduce participants to #LancsBox, a new-generation software package for the analysis of language data and corpora developed at Lancaster University
  • Support participants in building their own corpus within #LancsBox
  • Familiarise participants with some common approaches to analysing a corpus (e.g., calculating relative frequency)
  • Develop participants’ understanding of good principles and practice in using corpus approaches to create wordlists to inform the design of language assessments