Academic Spoken English Corpus Research Articles

A Contrastive Study of Boosters in a Corpus of Academic Spoken English

The present study intended to investigate the use of boosters in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). It examined whether native and non-native speakers of English differed from each other in boosters’ use based on Hyland (2005) across academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles in academic spoken English. The results of the UNIANOVA inferential test revealed that not only did native speakers of English utilize boosters more frequently than non-native ones across the four variables, but they also employed boosters in a way that was specific to academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles. Besides the influence of culture and proficiency on boosters’ use, this corpus analysis study found that native English speakers put their statements under focus so that they sound convincing to the audience in soft sciences more than the hard ones. It also indicated native speakers’ greater attempt to convince their audience of the truth in their propositions, show new pieces of information as true, and back their own manipulative or persuasive purposes in highly interactive speeches more than the other levels of interactivity. Furthermore, it was shown that female native speakers exceeded to express opinions, state a suggestion with confidence in their knowledge of the topic, and minimize the possibility of accepting other options in academic spoken English of the MICASE. Ultimately, it illustrated that native academic speakers of English of faculty role rated higher to strengthen their existence, position, argument, claims, and commitment to their speech.

If you look at the table…: Directives in conference presentations and university lectures

AbstractThis paper investigates differences in the characteristic form, frequency and role of directives in two spoken academic genres, conference presentations and university lectures. The study also reports the existence of differences between English native and non‐native speakers in the way they use directives at conferences. Data consist of a self‐compiled corpus of conference talks and a comparable corpus of lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Results show that, comparatively, directives in lectures are stronger and less mitigated than in conference presentations. Conference speakers in our study make the intrinsic imposition in directives more palatable for the peer audience by using milder directive forms, deploying indirectness and stressing communal membership. Non‐native speakers' directives show interesting similarities with those in lectures, a possible sign of overlapping or confusion of two major genres in the “overpopulated” generic world of academics. Findings on conference presentations and lectures are also compared with existing evidence on directives in written research articles: some characteristic roles of directives in writing are irrelevant in speech, while others, e.g. integrating visuals in the presentation and reactivating background and previously constructed content, are central to the spoken genres but irrelevant to writing.

Detecting Vocal Fatigue with Neural Embeddings.

Vocal fatigue refers to the feeling of tiredness and weakness of voice due to extended utilization. This paper investigates the effectiveness of neural embeddings for the detection of vocal fatigue. We compare x-vectors, ECAPA-TDNN, and wav2vec 2.0 embeddings on a corpus of academic spoken English. Low-dimensional mappings of the data reveal that neural embeddings capture information about the change in vocal characteristics of a speaker during prolonged voice usage. We show that vocal fatigue can be reliably predicted using all three types of neural embeddings after 40 minutes of continuous speaking when temporal smoothing and normalization are applied to the extracted embeddings. We employ support vector machines for classification and achieve accuracy scores of 81% using x-vectors, 85% using ECAPA-TDNN embeddings, and 82% using wav2vec 2.0 embeddings as input features. We obtain an accuracy score of 76%, when the trained system is applied to a different speaker and recording environment without any adaptation.

The Pragmatic Functions of I think in Different Genres

The present paper aims to examine the occurrence of I think in different genres. A collected data of I think from graduate student research interview and objectivism group study within Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is analyzed. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are included and the selection tool Antconc 3.4.4 are adopted in the study. By using concordance, all the context including I think are collected. Meanwhile, some phrases (such as I think so, what I think, I think of, etc.) are deleted from the analysis. It is found that I think in different positions and with different collocations fulfill different pragmatic functions respectively. The phrase I think is very frequent in GSRI and OSG, which is due to the nature of the discourse, where the participants are engaged in the communication. From the perspective of syntax and collocation, a lot of examples are analyzed in details. It is found that the interpretation of I think cannot be reached without exploring its linguistic context. In addition, a more detailed observation of linguistic context of I think in OSG and GSRI is explored. Some epistemic certainty (certainly, really, etc.) are included in research interview, with the function of emphasis and deliberation. The study might help to reconsider the functions of I think in different genres.

An Analysis of the Multiword Units Presented in IELTS Speaking Preparation Books Published by Iranian Authors

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to be representative of the authentic language that people use in real world. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed, and several practical suggestions are made in order to inform teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers of the importance of related corpus linguistic studies.

Stories and scenarios: Lecturers’ use of fantastic hypothetical events

A number of studies have examined the occurrence of stories in lecture contexts, and have suggested that stories can encourage student engagement and the acquisition and retention of lecture information content. Some of these studies have analysed story structures in terms of Labov and Waletzky's model (1967) or the more elaborate model developed by Martin (2008). Such models work well for stories that recount events that took place in past time, but they do not capture another type of story, the hypothetical scenario, sufficiently well. Drawing on prior research into stories in lecture discourse, and ‘Imagining Scenarios’ (Ädel 2010, 2012), we identify and describe passages in lectures where listeners are invited to imagine a fantastic hypothetical situation. Scenario identification criteria were developed, and examples were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Novice EMI lecturers may understandably be nervous about straying away from the delivery of facts and into the realms of fantasy, but our findings suggest that scenario-telling is part of the experienced lecturer's repertoire, and is an engaging way of elaborating abstract technical terms, concepts, or arguments central to a disciplinary topic.

Gender Differences in Disagreement Strategies in Oral Academic Discourse

The research aims to identify the gender differences in expressing disagreement in oral academic discourse. Examples containing explicit and implicit ways of expressing disagreement are collected through reading a corpus of texts chosen from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), including speech genres of seminar, discussion, defense of the dissertation and colloquium. Our study confirmed previous observations that utterances of explicit unmitigated disagreement or criticism are generally not typical of the American academic environment. The research findings reveal that both men and women tend to express disagreement explicitly using basic mitigation strategies. Unmitigated utterances with straightforward disagreement are infrequent and used mainly by teachers, which is most likely due to the other sociolinguistic variables apart from gender, and in particular by the status of speakers in teacher-student situations. Contrary to previous claims, men prefer the tactics of down-toning, represented by language patterns with the meaning of problematic certainty and subjectivity, as well as the use of lexical hedges. Female teachers recurrently use particular ways of implementing the tactics of mitigating implicit expression of disagreement, which may be specific of their individual styles. The research confirms that the distribution of particular language patterns across speakers should be taken into account when studying the gender aspects of communication.

WHAT IS VALUABLE IN THE ACADEME: CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

The paper focuses on the corpus-based analysis of academic discourse values. The research aim is to reveal how teachers transmit academic discourse values through their everyday interactions with students (during lectures, seminars) and to reveal, which values are relevant for the students (based on the analysis of their essays, research papers and some such). The research relies on corpus-based approach and primary methods used are a semantic analysis and a context analysis as well as definition analysis of evaluative means. The research results have revealed that various values play important role in academic interactions and shape the image of the academe – on the local as well as on the global scale. The study of the contexts containing the word valuable in British National Corpus (Davis, 2008-), British Academic Spoken English (Nesi, & Thompson, 2000-), British Academic Written English (Nesi, 2008-), Corpus of Russian Student Texts (Rakhilina, Zevakhina, & Dzhakupova, 2013-) and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2002-) has revealed that the values of academic discourse can be subdivided into six domains: emotional, cognitive, educational, research-related, academic life-related, topic- / area-related. The further applicability of research findings manifests itself in various avenues of research: linguistics (evaluative means), axiology (cross-disciplinary study of values), teaching practices (academic discourse genres) and others.

The OpenCourseWare lecture: A new twist on an old genre?

This paper explores OpenCourseWare (OCW) lectures as a key resource for EAP research and practice. The aim is to gain insights into the distinctive features of this technology-driven lecture format and how it may differ from the traditional classroom lecture not intended for an online audience. The analysis was structured into two parts. First, the digital affordances provided by two pioneers of the open education movement (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University) were surveyed to understand how they support and enhance the lecture experience. Then, 15 lectures from their OCW platforms were analyzed with corpus tools to extract linguistic features of lecturer-audience interaction (i.e., I-you patterns, dialogic episodes, informal expressions). For comparative purposes, the same analysis was performed on a corpus comprised of 15 lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Results showed a wide array of supporting digital affordances beyond video-recorded lectures, including lecture transcripts with metadata, content structuring, and navigational features. The linguistic analysis revealed that the OCW lecturers used considerably more I-you patterns to engage with students on an interpersonal level than the MICASE lecturers. The findings provide insights into how OCW lectures can be effectively leveraged for improving lecture comprehension for EAP settings.

Intensification of Affirmativity: Definitely as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Conversation

From a pragmatic-analytic perspective, this study examines how definitely as a discourse marker (DM) functions in spoken conversation. Three corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC) are used to investigate the multifarious pragmatic functions of definitely between interlocutors. It is practicable to use definitely as a DM in pre-front field and it frequently occurs in everyday language use. In light of the three corpora with respect to the DM definitely introduced in this study, there may be divergent types of definitely that occur in spoken conversation. Based on my dataset, definitely exhibits four types of pre-front use. For instance, definitely appears by itself and it also occurs with specific discourse particles such as oh, yeah, and yes and with negators such as no and not. Lastly, its repetitive pre-front use is also found. The analysis from a pragmatic perspective in regard to definitely as a DM proposes that definitely can play a great variety of pragmatic functions such as those of acting as a pre-closing device, or devices to express and solicit approval, consensus, eagerness, stimulation, gratification, floor-holding, topic-shift, intimacy, and bridging between interlocutors in spoken conversation. From perspectives of semantic and pragmatic analysis, definitely has an affirmative semantic connotation and it could strongly serve as an affirmative conversational response device.

Pedagogical Implications of Corpus-based Approaches to ELT in Pakistan

<p>The advent of corpora has opened new vistas for language study and restructured linguists’ and academicians’ approaches to lexicography and English language teaching (ELT). After 1980s, the use of online language corpora and computer tools garnered tremendous attention of English language teachers and academicians. Keeping in view the modern trends and needs of learners, this research focused on the practical implications of online corpora for ELT and its utility in the Pakistani context. Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is used as a reference corpus for this research. MICASE is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech (almost two hundred hours of recording). The transcribed data of MICASE includes wide range of speech events like seminars, lectures, advisory meetings and lab sessions. The study identified the utility of lexical items at syntactic level and its usage in various contexts. Furthermore, the layers of meanings and uses of lexicons through in-depth study of right and left collocates were explored in the reference corpus. The results showed that lexicons can be used as noun, verb and adjective depending upon the context of the study and right and left collocates play a significant role in understanding the meanings of lexical items in various contexts. Thus, this strategy can be fruitful for English language learners and academic discourse community who are interested in understanding the versatile uses of lexical items and their contextual meaning.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> collocate, context, corpus, ELT, MICASE</p>

Degree Modifier Associations in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English

Degree Modifier Associations in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English

To Use or Not to Use the Shorter Forms: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Apologetic Expressions “Sorry and I’m sorry” in American Spoken English Discourse

This corpus-based study explores how linguistic and sociocognitive factors designate when, why, and how speakers say sorry and I’m sorry in two corpora of American spoken English; namely, Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English and Corpus of Contemporary American English. It is well-documented that a given word and its surrounding words or phrases bear a mutual impact on one another’s function. This study tries to cast some light on the shades of differences between sorry and I’m sorry, which seem to be taken for granted by non-native speakers of English, through analyzing one academic and one non-academic corpora. The results of the functional analysis suggest that most instances of the word sorry were used to indicate interruption, self-repair, and expressing regret, whereas I’m sorry was chiefly exploited to express regret and apology. The use of either sorry or I’m sorry was guided by the function intended by the interlocutor. These findings are justified with reference to form–function mappings, sociocognitive alignments, and other discourse considerations.

ГЕНДЕРНЫЙ АСПЕКТ ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ НЕСОГЛАСИЯ В УСТНОМ АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ КОРПУСА MICASE)

The article analyzes the specificity of expressing disagreement from the viewpoint of the gender aspect by the example of Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The author examines a communicative situation, in which the teacher corrects the student’s mistake or disagrees with his opinion. The paper describes the basic means to explicate disagreement and pragmatic linguistic means to soften the categoricity of a statement in English scientific discourse. The analysis identified insignificant gender differences that testify for the necessity of the further verification of the stereotypes of male and female speech behaviour.

‘Two rules are at play when it comes to none’: A corpus-based analysis of singular versus plural none

This paper identifies discrepancies between prescriptive grammar rules concerning the number of the indefinite pronoun none and the actual use of this pronoun in modern academic English as shown in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Whereas prescriptive rules state that the number of none is determined by its referent or by the user's desired effect, the analyses of the MICASE and MICUSP search results suggest that, regardless of the modality of discourse, (1) the number of none with an anaphoric referent is determined by the number of its referent and (2) the principle of proximity applies without exception when none is used as part of a ‘none of + singular noun/pronoun’ phrase and applies frequently but not always when followed by an ‘of + plural noun/pronoun’ phrase.

Language assessment and the inseparability of lexis and grammar: Focus on the construct of speaking

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests, the paper then reviews rubrics of popular high-stakes speaking tests and critically discusses how far these rubrics capture the central aspects of spoken language identified in the corpus analyses as well as the centrality of phraseology in language. It closes with recommendations for speaking assessment in the light of this characterization of real-world spoken lexicogrammar.

Compiling computer-mediated spoken language corpora

This paper discusses key issues in the compilation of spoken language corpora in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment, using data from the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE), a corpus ofSkypeconversations currently being compiled at Saarland University, Germany, in cooperation with European and US partners. Based on first findings,Skypeis presented as a suitable tool for collecting informal spoken data. In addition, new recommendations concerning data compilation and transcription are put forward to supplement existing best practice as presented in Wynne (2005). We recommend the preservation of multimodal features during anonymisation, and the addition of annotation elements already at the transcription stage, particularly CMC-related discourse features, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) features (e.g. non-standard language and code-switching), as well as the inclusion of prosodic, paralinguistic, and non-verbal annotation. Additionally, we propose a layered corpus design in order to allow researchers to focus on specific annotation features.

Effectiveness of Mobile Applications in Vocabulary Teaching

Smartphones are increasingly becoming an ordinary part of our daily lives. With their remarkable capacity, applications used in these devices are extremely varied. In terms of language teaching, the use of these applications has opened new windows of opportunity, innovatively shaping the way instructors teach and students learn. This 4 week-long study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a mobile application on teaching 40 figurative idioms from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) corpus compared to traditional activities. Quasi-experimental research design with pretest and posttest was employed to determine the differences between the scores of the control (n=25) and the experimental group (n=25) formed with convenience sampling. Results indicate that participants in the experimental group performed significantly better in the posttest, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mobile application used in this study on learning idioms. The study also provides recommendations towards the use of mobile applications in teaching vocabulary.

The Reconceptualization of Academic Discourse as a Professional Practice in the Digital Age: A Critical Genre Analysis of TED Talks

<p>This paper explores how academic discourse is reconceptualized as a professional practice via the web-mediated genre of TED talks (Technology, Entertainment and Design), popularizing speeches delivered by experts in fields that range from the ‘hard’ disciplines to the social sciences and the humanities. More precisely, this study compares two corpora of academic spoken discourse, i.e., a corpus of transcribed TED talks given by academics (TED_ac) and a corpus of university lecture transcripts (MICASE_lect) drawn from the <em>Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English </em>(MICASE) to understand how academics’ communicative purposes differ in these two settings. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia 2012) and Discourse Analysis (Goffman 1981; Fairclough 1989; Pennycook 1994; De Fina 1995; Benwell/Stokoe 2006; De Fina 2006), the present study sets out to investigate ways in which academics make use of language on the TED stage to achieve their “private intentions” as professionals (Bhatia 2012), e.g., building up their identity as experts as well as promoting their research and scholarship, rather than training a group of novices in their discipline or merely informing mass audiences. To this end, consideration is given to the distribution of first and second person pronouns in the two pragmatic contexts under investigation. Special emphasis is placed on referents and discourse functions of the pronoun <em>we</em>, which is significantly more frequent in TED_ac than in MICASE_lect. Despite its language-centered approach, this study has a marked sociological intent, as it casts light on an instance of academic discourse seen as an example of “professional practice” embedded in the wider context of a “professional culture” (Bhatia 2012).</p>

“BEING WHAT ONE OUGHT TO BE”: ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA IN THE ACADEMIC SPOKEN DISCOURSE OF BULGARIAN AND GERMAN STUDENTS

In an age of globalization and super-diversity, the concept of English as a national, homogeneous entity has been seriously undermined, and non-native speakers have been encouraged to use the language without constant recourse to the native-speaker ideal. Yet different varieties of English have different value attached to them on the linguistic market, in Bourdieu’s terms; and non-native speakers are in possession of different linguistic capital. The paper focuses on the relationships and attitudes to English on behalf of Bulgarian and German university students participating in a joint project in which a corpus of academic spoken English is compiled. Alongside collecting the corpus, the project appears to have a positive educational outcome in that it raises awareness about the specificity of English as a lingua franca.