PACL (Pakistan Association of Corpus Linguists) has successfully concluded its third international corpus linguistics workshop in Islamabad, Pakistan. Participants agreed that the workshop, organized by Department of English, IIUI, was engaging and informative.
Over one hundred people, representing twenty universities, gathered on IIUI’s campus to hear Dr Hardie’s inaugral lecture on “Designing and Documenting a Corpus”. Dr Hardie, is a renowned corpus linguist, who is the Director of CASS (Corpora Approaches to Social Sciences), University of Lancaster, UK.
The two-day workshop, held on the 22nd and 23rd of October featured a series of workshops led by Dr Hardie on a range of topics related to corpus linguistics: including “Beyond the Basics: CQPweb”, and “Using LancsBox” (a newly developed corpus tool at Lancaster. After completing the final workshop on “Analyzing Arabic Grammar through Corpus Data”, all participants were presented with certificates. Later, Dr Hardie was presented with a shield to thank him for his expert instructions over the past two days.
Following the event, Dr Aleem Shakir (Assistant Professor, GC University Faisalabad) commented, “I really enjoyed learning about LancsBox. It is user friendly and has more functions than other softwares like AntConc or Wordsmith Tools.” Dr Tehseen Zahra (Assistant Professor, Air University), concurred “That the workshops were great, and we learned many new things.”
Dr Ayaz Afsar, Professor Department of English, IIUI, has recently taken on the role of PACL Chairman and is dedicated to organizing regular workshops to ensure that scholars have access to cutting edge research and the know how to use new methodologies and software tools in Corpus Linguistics.