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The University of Southampton
Centre for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research

Beyond Borders, Beyond Words: Issues & Challenges in Developing An Open-Access Multimodal Corpus of L2 Academic English from A Sino-British University Seminar

Time:
16:00 - 17:30
Date:
25 January 2018
Venue:
Building 65 Room 1173 Avenue Campus University of Southampton SO17 1BF

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Ying Zheng at Ying.Zheng@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Part of the annual seminar series for CLLEAR.

The Corpus of UNNC Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (UNNC CAWSE) is an ongoing project which aims to build a large collection of Chinese students’ English language samples from one of the few English-medium instruction (EMI) universities in China. The campus creates a unique environment for teaching and learning and also provides exciting opportunities for linguistic studies into Academic English from diverse theoretical and analytical perspectives. The project collects students’ language samples from a variety of assessment tasks (both written and spoken) and speech events (spoken and multi-modal) from the preliminary-year programme at UNNC. The final product of UNNC CAWSE will offer open-access electronic resources (including a multi-modal subcorpus) available for researchers and practitioners who are interested in a wide range of topics, including for example Second Language Acquisition (SLA), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English as a Lingual Franca (ELF)/World Englishes, and many other aspects of the Written and Spoken English unique to this new corpus.

This talk will first introduce this unique UNNC CAWSE corpus including its design and construction process. Then various challenges and issues arising from using innovative approaches in constructing an L2 multimodal corpus will be described and discussed. Based on our current data transcription and annotation, some preliminary findings which share certain characteristics with ELF will also be presented.

Speaker information

Dr Yu-Hua Chen, University of Nottingham, Ningbo Campus. Dr Yu-Hua Chen has been working at the intersection of Corpus Linguistics, Language Testing and Assessment and Second Language Research for the past few years. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University. Yu-Hua has extensive experience working on the development and validation of language tests for various levels and purposes, including working for Pearson (London) as a Test Development Manager and for the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC, Taiwan) as a Test Developer and Researcher.

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