Developing a multimodal corpus of L2 academic English from an English medium of instruction university in China

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale for and design of a new multimodal corpus of L2 academic English from a Sino-British university in China: the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (cawse). The unique context for this corpus provides language samples from Chinese students who use English as a second language (L2) in a preliminary-year programme, which prepares students for academic studies at university level, at a campus where English is used as the Medium of Instruction (emi). Data were collected from a variety of settings, including written (i.e., exam scripts and essays) and spoken assessments (i.e., interviews and presentations), covering the full range of grades awarded to those language samples, as well as from student group interactions during teaching and learning activities. The multimodal nature of the corpus is realised through the availability of selected audio/video recordings accompanied by the orthographically transcribed text. This open-access corpus is designed to help shed light on Chinese students' academic L2 English language use in a variety of written, spoken and multimodal discourses.