The John Swales Conference Corpus

registration: 2012/12/24 07:09:30, last modified: 2012/12/24 07:09:30
title
  • The John Swales Conference Corpus
title.abbreviation
title.alternative
  • JSCC
creator
  • researcher John Swales (project leader), University of Michigan
  • recorder Begoña Bellés-Fortuño, Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez and Christine A. Räisänen (video-taping), University of Michigan
  • transcriber Stephen DiDomenico, GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain)
  • transcriber Caitlin Gdowski, Reese Havlatka, , GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain)
  • transcriber Kristen Keller, , GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain)
  • transcriber Mercedes Querol-Julián, , GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain)
  • annotator Matthew Brook O’Donnell, (proofing & XML encoding), University of Michigan
  • annotator Miranda Kozman, (proofing & XML encoding), University of Michigan
  • annotator Jesse Sielaff, (proofing & XML encoding), University of Michigan
  • annotator Stefanie Wulff, (proofing & XML encoding), University of Michigan
subject
  • transcript corpus
subject.linguisticField
  • computational_linguistics
  • discourse_analysis
subject.monoMultilingual
  • monolingual
subject.resourceSubject
  • corpus
description
  • The John Swales Conference Corpus is a collection of transcripts from an academic conference held in honour of John Swales hosted by the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan. The corpus contains both lectures and question and answer sessions.
description.price *This metadata is only as a guide
  • Freely available for study, research and teaching.
  • For commercial use, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required.
description.language
  • English
description.inputDevice
description.inputEnvironment
description.speakingStyle
description.speechMode
description.samplingRate
description.additionalData
publisher
  • the Regents of the University of Michigan
contributor
  • sponsor English Language Institute, University of Michigan
  • sponsor Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
contributor.attribute.author.motherTongue
contributor.attribute.author.dialect
contributor.attribute.author.level
contributor.attribute.author.age
contributor.attribute.author.gender
contributor.attribute.speaker.motherTongue
contributor.attribute.speaker.dialect
contributor.attribute.speaker.level
contributor.attribute.speaker.age
contributor.attribute.speaker.gender
contributor.attribute.speaker.number
date.created
  • 2007-00-00 2009-00-00
date.issued
  • 2009-00-00
date.modified
type
  • Text
type.discourseType
  • interactive_discourse
  • oratory
type.linguisticType
  • primary_text
type.purpose
  • analysis
type.style
  • speech lectures and Q and A sessions
type.form
  • unfixed
type.sentence
  • short
  • long
type.annotation
  • annotated
type.annotationSample
  • The corpus was transcribed basically using the standard MICASE transcription conventions. However, unique to this corpus, the speaker information has been double-coded; in addition to the standard speaker (S) number, stable participant (PID) initials have been added, which allows investigators to track rhetorical preferences and speaking styles of individuals throughout the corpus.

    , , etc.: Speaker IDs, assigned in the order they first speak.
    , , : Unknown speaker, without and with gender identified
    : Probable but not definite identity of speaker
    : Two or more speakers, in unison (used mostly for laughter)
    : Pauses of 4 seconds or longer are timed to the nearest second.
    ,: Comma indicates a brief (1-2 second) mid-utterance pause with non-phrase-final intonation contour.
    .: Period indicates a brief pause accompanied by an utterance final (falling) intonation contour; not used in a syntactic sense to indicate complete sentences.
    …: Ellipses indicate a pause of 2-3 seconds
    xxx: Speech that is spoken simultaneously, either at the ends and beginnings of turns, or as interruptions or backchannel cues in the middle of one speaker’s turn.
    Embedded utterance ( tag within a tag): Backchannel cues from a speaker who doesn’t hold the floor and unsuccessful attempts to take the floor are embedded within the current speaker's turn.
    Embedded and overlapped utterance ( tag within an embedded utterance): Backchannel cues or unsuccessful interruptions that overlap with the main speaker's speech.
    or : laughter is marked. Speaker ID not marked if current speaker laughs.
    : Various contextual (non-speech) events.
    xxx: Used when part of an utterance is read verbatim.
    xxx: Non-English words or phrases.
    xxx: Used when a speaker makes a mistake without self-correcting, and the error might otherwise appear to be a transcribing error.

    The rest is omitted.

    http://micase.elicorpora.info/micase-statistics-and-transcription-conventions/micase-transcription-and-mark-up-convent
    MICASE Transcription and Mark-Up Conventions
    http://jscc.elicorpora.info/statistics-and-transcription-conventions
    JSCC Statistics and Transcription Conventions
type.sample


  • (... TEIHEADER omitted)



    okay one reason_ can you hear me everybody in the back?
    yeah
    one reason we chose to do this is because we find the E-A-P people tend to a to avoid the whole issue of testing, in other words we talk about really interesting things instead of testing and in fact for undergraduates and for secondary students around the world as we all know and Brian Paltridge did a very nice uh talk on this at- in triple A-L as we all know people throughout the world, lives' are determined by high stakes testing. their entrance their their their graduation from high school we're having a big issue in California right now. their entrance into university and Brian talked about their exit from university that's what Maria is going to be talking about today. so as we looked at Maria's data this is Maria Allan who's one of my graduate students ah yes at San Diego State. as we looked at her data we said what would be of interest and what in fact will not be talked about by others in this conference? and we thought we'd be fairly secure in saying that the the issue will be testing ah ah the next move of course was to see who had written about testing and if you look at our very short bibliography at the end of the hand-out you will see that the honorary John Swales has in fact written about testing. he's written about everything, so this is one of the themes and this is a very good article if you can get hold of it. very very interesting. about prompts in uh in essay exams. uh Dan Douglas has an entire book on assessing uh E-S-P and Ken has got a very nice piece uh in his uh his book on wri- second language writing. but there's not that much, and if you look at the overlap between the people who discuss E-A-P in quite a serious way and those whose discuss this testing you don't find much i mean we are not much into calibration for example on that kind of thing. um, so i'm gonna do the first part of this talk about testing in general and some of the issues, and then Maria's going to talk about our local issue, which in fact we think have- has international implications. um you can see the f- um a Roman number one this is a very American hand-out, we're using the American outline form mm? i've learned that only we do that. all right um, often writing, though not done very frequently in secondary schools or in universities in many parts of the world, is used as the barometer of the student's proficiency. even though it may not be nearly as important as reading and listening, which most do too. um as you know some good qualities of writing tests is reliability one of the themes that the famous test makers_ is it I-ELTS?
    yeah
    thank you. I-ELTS and the famous E-T-S examiners the TOEFL people, G-R-E. one thing they do very well is reliability. integrated reliability and test re-test reliability they're very very good at that i'm a reader for E-T-S periodically for my sins and in fact i find that they um they do a very nice job with that. but the other issue of course is validity. face validity of course one of the things Johns- Allan ran into many years ago some of you may remember when he gave cloze texts to Saudis who showed up and he gave them a cloze and they said oh my goodness what is this all right face validity is a real issue but also content validity for our classroom and for place for for I-ELTS and for TOEFL for example or G-R-E the issue can be predictive validity are we really predicting possibilities for students' success. um i went online and looked at some of these preparation courses and found that almost every uh country has a has a test of some kind that that's a gate-keeping test for university. and i just found a few of them you see one of my favorites which i know used to know fairly well is the Thanawaya A'ama from uh from Egypt, for which students prepare a a very for a very long time many parts of the United States we have high school leaving exams, i'm on the national committee, you're not going to believe this the national committee for no child left behind George Bush's and i'm on the national testing committee and uh you should see the kinds of discussions it's fascinating. um i got on the committee just to find out what's being discussed as much as anything else. um here are some examples of high ticks- stakes tests i took the TOEFL and we are particularly interested this morning in reading_ in writing so i took some TOEFL prompts and i took I-ELTS prompts and you may wanna have a look at those and i wish we have time to discuss it because i think they're very interesting in terms of what they require students to do. the first one for example test one in TOEFL summarize the points made in the lecture you just heard, explaining how they cast doubt on the points made in the reading. listen to how intertextual, how demanding, this kind of test would be under uh timed circumstances. very very difficult. the advance placement exam in in it now has what is called a research argument, where in fact you must choose four or five texts read them quickly and then use the arguments from the text to support your own argument take a look at what E-A-P does and see how difficult that work is. uh the second task however which for which uh TOEFL has been uh criticized i think is this kind of good teachers are more important to child's development than good parents that kind of argument which is supposed to come from students' prior knowledge. is it better to live in the city or in the country? you know that one TOEFL? and and I-ELTS has some one of the same kind uh the their writing task two is similar to the writing test two of the TOEFL and they wrote a very defensive piece online about how in fact this may not be content_ this may not be particularly valid, but their first writing task is very different and in fact would have been uh would have made some of the students that Maria had happy, because in fact the students are to look at a visual and discuss what in fact the information it imparts and that's a very important kind of ability in university. so i'm going to to uh move us now to our high stakes assessment issue, and some of the conflicts and problems that occur when you have a local level uh exam that's very high stakes. all right? and the curriculum that goes with it or doesn't go with it as the case may be you want this one? (xx) eww...
    (xx) five minutes just switching mics

    The rest is omitted.

    http://jscc.elicorpora.info/download
    The John Swales Conference Corpus Download "JSCC01.xml"
format.extent
  • Size: 100,000 words in 23 transcribed files
format.medium
  • download
  • file mormat: XML files
format.encoding
  • UTF-8
format.markup
format.functionality
identifier
identifier.doi
identifier.islrn
source
  • lectures and question and answer sessions recorded at an academic conference
language
  • English
language.area
  • America USA
relation
relation.utilization *This metadata is automatically extracted
coverage.temporal
  • 2006
coverage.spacial
  • Michigan, United States
rights
  • The John Swales Conference Corpus (JSCC) is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan (UM), who hold the copyright. The corpus files are freely available for study, research and teaching. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. For further information about copyright permissions, please contact Dr. Ute Römer at elicorpora@umich.edu.