(ELC) Engineering Lecture Corpus

The Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) is a growing collection of transcripts of English-medium engineering lectures from around the world. Corpus development has been assisted by a British Council PMI2 Research Cooperation grant. The corpus currently contains lectures from Coventry University in the UK, under the leadership of Hilary Nesi, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), under the leadership of Ummul Khair Ahmad, and Auckland University of Technology (AUT), under the leadership of Lynn Grant.

Aims

• To identify and describe typical engineering lecture discourse features;
• To compare English-medium engineering lecturing styles in different parts of the world;
• To explore the current role of English-medium instruction in engineering;
• To develop and test a system of pragmatic annotation for corpora generally.

Corpus composition

Most of the lectures collected are in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. The lectures were recorded using video and audio equipment and vary in duration between 41-104 minutes. 

Here is a summary of the (current) 2014 version of the ELC:

Project team

• Hilary Nesi - contact at h.nesi@coventry.ac.uk
• Siân Alsop - contact at alsops@coventry.ac.uk