The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus
-
Michael P. Stevens
Abstract
This chapter reports on the motivations, design, and challenges of building the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (CAWSE), an open-access corpus of Chinese students’ English samples collected from a Sino-foreign university in China. To date, the corpus comprises over 1.5 million words in the subcorpus of written assessment, a subcorpus of 63.8 hours of spoken assessment, and a multimodal subcorpus totalling 24 hours of audio/ video classroom data, including 107 tasks already or in process of being transcribed and annotated. Focusing on the design and construction of the multimodal subcorpus comprised of video recordings of student interaction in classroom settings, we report specifically on the challenges that arise from the institutional and material realities of working with gatekeepers, handling data ethically, and selecting and processing data that is representative. We also explain the motivations behind focusing on student language, which we characterize as an emerging variety of L2 academic English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). We hope to provide insight into the complexities of developing a multimodal corpus from the unique setting of a foreign-based EMI campus.
Abstract
This chapter reports on the motivations, design, and challenges of building the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (CAWSE), an open-access corpus of Chinese students’ English samples collected from a Sino-foreign university in China. To date, the corpus comprises over 1.5 million words in the subcorpus of written assessment, a subcorpus of 63.8 hours of spoken assessment, and a multimodal subcorpus totalling 24 hours of audio/ video classroom data, including 107 tasks already or in process of being transcribed and annotated. Focusing on the design and construction of the multimodal subcorpus comprised of video recordings of student interaction in classroom settings, we report specifically on the challenges that arise from the institutional and material realities of working with gatekeepers, handling data ethically, and selecting and processing data that is representative. We also explain the motivations behind focusing on student language, which we characterize as an emerging variety of L2 academic English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). We hope to provide insight into the complexities of developing a multimodal corpus from the unique setting of a foreign-based EMI campus.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
-
II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
-
III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
-
II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
-
III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
