Members of the research project on developing a corpus of the academic Kazakh language visited Coventry University in the UK

On November 25-29, 2024, members of the research project AP23488585 “Digital Humanities: Development of a Corpus of the Academic Kazakh Language” visited Coventry University.

The purpose of the trip was to meet with the scientists participated in the development of the British Academic Corpus of Written English (BAWE) and to get acquainted with the experience of creating an academic language corpus.

The working trip to Coventry University was attended by the project supervisor – Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Kazakh Linguistics Gulnar Sarseke and Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science Yerkin Omarbekov.

During the meeting, the project supervisor Gulnar Sarseke presented the scientific project “Digital Humanities: Development of the Corpus of Academic Kazakh Language”. The main idea of ​​the project is to strengthen the scientific and practical potential and capabilities of the Kazakh language in academic texts, establish the concept of academic Kazakh language, select the vocabulary of academic texts in the Kazakh language and develop a list of academic words in the Kazakh language.

As part of the working trip of Gulnar Sarseke and Yerkin Omarbekov met with Coventry University scientists Hilary Nesi (PhD, Professor of English at the Research Center for Arts, Memory and Communities), Sian Alsop (PhD, Associate Professor, Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Learning) and Benet Vincent (PhD, Associate Professor of Applied Sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities).

Professor Hilary Nesi, Project Manager of the British Academic Corpus of Written English (BAWE), shared her experience of using academic use of English for academic purposes, creating and using dictionaries, reference materials, and a corpus. The corpus of British academic writing of English was created as part of the project “Studying Writing Genres in British Higher Education”. The corpus contains a total of 6.9 million words. At the meeting, the scientists who created this corpus talked about how they conducted their work and shared their experience of creating the corpus. Hilary Nesi was Project Manager and Principal Investigator for the Corpus of British Academic Spoken English (BASE) (2001–2005) and the Corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE) (2004–2007). Sian Alsop worked as a researcher on a number of projects, including the Corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE). Benet Vincent was a member of the BAWE Quicklinks team. This site was a major part of the BAWE Concordances project. In addition, the project participants exchanged views on the upcoming work and expected results in the development of the Corpus of Academic Kazakh.

We would like to thank our international colleagues for the productive meeting and the experience gained.