The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

Abstract

Paul Thompson p.a.thompson@reading.ac.ukSLALS, Language Resource Centre, PO Box 241, TheUniversity of Reading, Reading RG6 6WBHilary Nesih.nesi@warwick.ac.ukCELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7ALRunning time of project: Spring 1999–December 2003The primary aim of the project is to create a freely accessibleresource for research into spoken academic discourse. The EnglishLanguage Institute, Michigan University, has established an on-linecorpus (MICASE) representative of academic speech events in aNorth American university, and the present project (BASE) willconstitute a British counterpart to the Michigan corpus. A varietyof university speech events (lectures and seminars, in a range ofdisciplines, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level) arebeing recorded at two UK universities, then transcribed andencoded to form a searchable corpus. As of spring 2001, we haveover 130 lecture recordings, of which about 70 have beentranscribed. We also have about 20 video-recorded seminars, sevenof which have been transcribed.The corpus should provide a major resource for research intothe linguistic and rhetorical features of spoken academic discourse.One line of research that we will follow is an exploration of thelexis of academic lectures across the disciplines and we intend tocompile a Spoken Academic Word List to complement theAcademic Wordlist of Coxhead (1998), which was based on acorpus of written academic discourse.