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Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2026

Open to undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students, as well as researchers who want to improve their skills to apply corpus methods in their research.
Students working online

The University of Birmingham Corpus Linguistics Summer School is open to undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students, as well as researchers who want to improve their skills to apply corpus methods in their own research.

The 10th Corpus Linguistics Summer School will be fully online again and it will consist of synchronous and asynchronous elements. The synchronous part will take place from 6 to 9 July, 2026. Prior to the synchronous part, participants will be expected to complete asynchronous activities consisting of self-study video lectures and hands-on materials.

Our summer school aims to equip participants with critical expertise in both the theory and practice of corpus-supported linguistic research. Building on the strengths of our Centre for Corpus Research (CCR) and our guest speakers, we offer participants a learning experience that benefits their own specific research needs and enriches their experience as researchers more widely. There will also be an opportunity for participants to present their own work and receive feedback from our expert team. Given the specialised nature of the programme, a basic understanding of corpus linguistics is highly recommended.

Registration

Registration is now open and will close on 31 May, or when the maximum number of participants we can accommodate in our programme of activities is reached, whichever comes first. Cancellations are accepted until 31 May 2026.

Programme

The complete programme of the summer school will be available nearer the time.

Over the course of the four days, participants will be actively involved in two kinds of sessions:

  • Hands-on sessions which will put the emphasis on the learning of practical skills for the purpose of extracting and analysing corpus data of various kinds, and the application of this knowledge to specific research projects;
  • Sessions in which participants will learn about current corpus research from our team.

Synchronous sessions will be recorded and made available to the participants after each day.

Topics typically covered in the programme include (this is a non-exhaustive list and subject to change):

  • Analysing healthcare data using corpus linguistics
  • Analysing learner language
  • Computational modelling
  • Corpora and legal research
  • Corpus triangulation
  • CQPweb
  • Fake news
  • Introduction to R and tidyverse
  • Language change​ in online data
  • Sign language corpora
  • Sketch Engine
  • Tagging and parsing with Python and SpaCy
  • Topic models

The programmes of previous years are available for your reference:

Sinclair Lecture

As every year, the annual Sinclair Lecture will take place during the Summer School. This year, the Lecture will be delivered by Professor Andrew Kehoe (Birmingham City University). Further details will be announced in due course.

Guest speakers at the summer school

Our local team of corpus linguists includes Edward Clay, Jason Grafmiller, Jack Grieve, Susan Hunston, Sofia Malamatidou, Petar Milin, Akira Murakami, Florent Perek, Adam Schembri, Paul Thompson, Katharine Weetman, and Bodo Winter.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the Summer School.

Please do check this webpage for updates.