Colleges study hopes to give the gift of the gab

The Irish are well noted as having “the gift of the gab” but add 20 more nationalities to the conversation and the talking extends to one million words a day. This is borne out by an intriguing study carried at the world-renowned Shannon College of Hotel Management over the past year.

University of Cambridge, Mary Immaculate College, (MIC) and Shannon College of Hotel Management have been participating in a collaborative research project, capturing the language used in the context of hotel management by both native speakers of English and non-native speakers. This has resulted in the establishment of the Cambridge, Limerick and Shannon (CLAS) Corpus. 
The project, which is being funded by the University of Cambridge, entails the recording of one million words spoken by the students and faculty at the Shannon college.  The data includes the language use of 350 students as they go about their daily college life of lectures, tutorials and professional, practical training. In addition to having Irish students, other countries represented on campus are China, India, the USA, the Seychelles, South Korea, Malaysia, Ukraine and a number of EU countries.
“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,” said deputy director and registrar of Shannon College, Kate O’Connell.
Over 100 hours of recordings are being collected by Mary Immaculate College 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. The purpose of the large-scale data collection is manifold. For Cambridge University Press, it will provide a snapshot of the language of hotel management training and this will inform the design of textbooks for the international English for the tourism sector and for Cambridge University’s English language examinations sector. The data will feed into the English Profile Project, which aims to benchmark language competencies within the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The non-native speaker data collected in Shannon will be crucial in this benchmarking research.
For MIC and Shannon College, apart from the prestige of being involved in the project, it will result in exclusive access to the corpus for both postgraduate research and classroom materials design.
Project leader, Dr Anne O’Keeffe, senior lecturer in MIC and corpus consultant with Cambridge University Press, said the project is an example of how smaller third-level institutions can create critical research. 
“Over several years, MIC has built up an international reputation in corpus building within its inter-institutional networks. This is the third one-million word corpus that we have been involved in. It was very fortuitous for us to have Shannon College, a college with such a high international profile, on our doorstep when the opportunity presented itself to be part of the English profile project with Cambridge,” she added.