THE EMIBO CORPUS A resource for investigating lecture discourse across disciplines and lecture modes in an EMI context

The aim of this paper is to introduce and describe the EmiBO corpus and present some initial data. EmiBO is a corpus of transcribed Master’s degree university lectures in English given by Italian lecturers, featuring different disciplines and lecture modes. The corpus is constantly being expanded as new recordings are acquired and their transcriptions added. At present it includes 21 complete lecture events by 14 different lecturers in Engineering and Economics subjects, corresponding to 36 lecture hours and just over 200,000 words. Lecturer and student participant turns are annotated. One part of the corpus includes transcripts of audio and video recordings of face-to-face (F2F) lectures, while the other features transcripts of online lectures, including written elements in the chat. The inclusion of audio and video recordings of different lecture modes make it possible to focus on the interplay between spoken and written input, image and body language, while variations in communicative practices may be tracked as new lectures by the same speaker are added. The different modes brought together in a single corpus constitute a unique opportunity to investigate and compare language and non-verbal elements across EMI lecture contexts. Insights are given into the hitherto under-investigated features of Online Distance Learning in EMI, thus being of interest to others besides EMI scholars. Also of note is that non-native English speaking lecturer discourse practices may be compared cross-sectionally across different modes from a truly ELF-oriented perspective. The paper presents and comments quantitative data resulting from corpus analysis as well as outlining some initial qualitative explorations with suggestions for further development.