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- How do you work with computer-based language data?
- How do you build corpora?
- What is International English?
- Does language change when you skype?
- How do Germans, Spanish and Italians talk about their studies? Or food?
In this seminar, we try to answer these and more questions, using CASE – the Corpus of Academic Spoken English. CASE is compiled right here at the English Linguistics Department, with so far over 200 participants from 4 countries, with more to come. We collect conversations between students of English as a second language conducted via Skype on a variety of topics, from studying and work prospects to food and leisure activities,
With CASE, course participants will obtain a first-hand look at how international English is used in a computer-mediated context, but also at key issues in the design, compilation, organisation, transcription and annotation of a corpus of spoken English. Previous experience in corpus linguistics is not necessary. The seminar is thus particularly useful for students who are considering to use or compile corpora for research or teaching purposes. Typical topics for presentations and papers are International English features (influence of native language, mistake analysis or sociolinguistic issues), CMC features, pragmatic features such as discourse organisation, hesitation, overlap, or laughter, politeness, and corpus linguistic features such as corpus creation, transcription or annotation. Participants can also transcribe or annotate corpus data as part of their research.
As part of the seminar, students will also learn how to use transcription software and get hands-on experience with f4/f5, one of the most common programs used in the field. Course participants will then transcribe conversations from CASE and discuss the issues encountered during the transcription process. In order to pass the seminar, students will have to produce a finished transcription of at least 90 minutes of spoken data.
The accompanying voluntary tutorial offers students individual advice on the topics discussed in the seminar. Near the end of the semester, a paper conference will be held to make sure students are headed in the right direction with their term papers. For detailed course requirements please also consult the respective module descriptions. |
