Deciphering the hidden meaning of ‘refugee’ vs ‘immigrant’ with secondary school students

The 2023 summer school was not just for current generation of linguistics students, but also the future one that is still in secondary school. And also simply just for any secondary school student interested in the mysterious and ubiquitous workings of language.

As part of MEDAL’s outreach programme, the summer schools have an additional component specifically for secondary school students. The 2023 summer school, which was all about corpus linguistics, included a masterclassclass by Dagmar Divjak and Mari Aigro on using corpora to find out connotations that certain words used in the media might have.

In the first part of this masterclass, Dagmar Divjak from the University of Birmingham, introduced the notion of language variation using different heat maps of American English language data.

In the second part of the masterclass, post-doc Mari Aigro of the University of Tartu introduced the students to Sketch Engine.