We are very pleased to announce that the first part of the European Corpus of Academic Talk (EuroCoAT) can be searched by registered users via the internet.
Interested researchers may now access the 58,834-word corpus of 27 office hours’ consultations carried out in English as academic lingua franca at four different universities in Europe (Ireland, England, Sweden and the Netherlands). The transcripts may be downloaded as XML or txt.
The EuroCoAT project is a collaboration between the Universities of Extremadura, Birmingham, Limerick, Dalarna and VU Amsterdam. The corpus is the first of its kind to be made widely available. It provides transcripts of academic conversations between undergraduate Erasmus students (L1 Spanish) and their lecturers at different host universities. It may thus prove of interest to those whose research interests include spoken academic discourse, intercultural communication, English as a lingua franca, study abroad experiences or the assessment of oral skills, among others. Apart from the transcripts of academic mentoring sessions recorded between lecturers and Spanish undergraduate Erasmus students, full contextual information is provided in all cases (background information on participants, detailed description of the setting, topics covered or participants’ subjective judgements of possible on-stage effects on their interaction). The transcripts record (from left to right) (1) the speech entry number; (2) speaker identification; (3) transcribed speech (4) time stamp (every 30 seconds) and word/fragment of speech at which it occurs. The system of transcription used is based on the one developed by for the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (VOICE Project. 2007. VOICE Transcription Conventions [2.1]. (date of last access 04/06/2013). Full details of the transcription system used can be found at http://tinyurl.com/hjrlro6
We kindly invite all interested researchers to visit the EuroCoAT website for further details about the project, the corpus and how to access it. The project is supported by the Spanish ‘Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad’ (ref. FFI2011-22809).
- Fiona MacArthur (Research project leader, University of Extremadura)
- Rafael Alejo (University of Extremadura)
- Ana Piquer-Píriz (University of Extremadura)
- Carolina Amador (University of Extremadura)
- Jeannette Littlemore (Birmingham University)
- Tina Krennmayr (VU University Amsterdam)
- Annelie Ädel (University of Dalarna)
- Elaine Vaughan (University of Limerick)
- Fiona Farr (University of Limerick)