2 - The Asian Corpus of English

Summary

Chapter 2 introduces the ACE, a corpus of naturally occurring English as spoken as a lingua franca by Asian multilinguals, in a wide range of speech events: interviews; press conferences; service encounters; seminar discussions; working group discussions; workshop discussions; meetings; panels; question-and-answer sessions; and conversations, categorized under five major settings: education (25%), leisure (10%), professional business (20%), professional organisation (35%), and professional research/science (10%). ACE was collected to act as a complementary corpus to the VOICE, a corpus of naturally occurring English used as a lingua franca in primarily European settings. ACE data have been tagged following the transcription conventions originally developed by the VOICE project team. Users can browse the corpus data according to the five settings or according to the various data collection sites. A Web concordancer has been developed which allows users to search any word/phrase in ACE, and collocation information of the search word/phrase will be illustrated. Researchers and teachers/learners can explore the ACE data for various research and pedagogical purposes.