TaLC12 2016 (Gieβen)

This year's TaLC (Teaching and Language Corpora) conference took place at the Justus Liebig University of Gieβen (Germany). Over hundred participants from several continents came to attend the talks and to admire the posters presented. The weather was really nice, not to say very hot; ideal conditions for eating outside and talking and having a good time together during the social events planned for the end of the day. I enjoyed listening to exciting and inspiring presentations and plenary talks. Learning R under 35° C was hard, Christoph, but I promise you, I will go on and try to practise what you showed us during the workshop! A lot of talks and posters stroke me for their particularly brilliant performance, their content close to my research interest and for the original character of the topic. It seems that I missed some exciting events, but you can't be everywhere :).

The book of abstracts gives following insight into the main topics and concerns of TaLC12 (Sketch Engine, Thesaurus):

I understood, amongst other things, that native speakers' productions are not always reliable; I found evidence for this statement just 200m away from the conference location:

[Save the farmers. *Drink more milk ?instead of beer.]

I am grateful for all the coffee break and dinner discussions, for the organisers' welcoming presence, for the kind and effective help of the staff, and for having spotted the "real faces" of people we can consider as corpus linguistics milestones. I am also glad to have met researchers working in France who give me hope that corpus-assisted language learning and teaching is a viable concept in that country.