Asian Corpus of English (ACE)

Abstract

In recent years, the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has been gaining momentum. However, there have been few large-scale representative ELF corpora available for ELF research. The first such corpus, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) capturing spoken ELF interactions in Europe, was successfully developed by a project team led by Prof. Barbara Seidlhofer (2005 to 2013). Inspired by VOICE, a project team led by Prof. Andy Kirkpatrick compiled the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), a one-million-word corpus capturing spoken ELF interactions in Asia, which was officially launched online (http://corpus.eduhk.hk/ace) in 2014. The corpus data have been tagged following the transcription conventions originally developed by the VOICE project team. These tags enable us to obtain a clear picture of the transcribed speeches and make ACE and VOICE comparable. In this chapter, details of the ACE corpus design from a corpus methodological perspective will be introduced, and different features of the ACE online platform will be illustrated. Research possibilities using ACE data will then be explored, and the theoretical and methodological concerns will also be discussed. It is hoped that ACE will fill a gap and open new windows in the area of ELF research.