W-11 OnCAL, the Online Corpus of Academic Lectures, an English language support system for university science and engineering instructors

抄録

OnCAL, the Online Corpus of Academic Lectures, was built using transcriptions downloaded from MIT Opencourseware and Stanford Engineering Everywhere to offer language support to teachers and students in science and engineering that are non-native speakers of English (NNS). OnCAL shows abundant examples of interactive language blended with technical content, the type of language needed by NNS teachers in science and engineering lectures. As of May 2012, the number of lecture transcriptions included in OnCAL is 466. The lectures were delivered in both undergraduate and graduate courses related to various fields in science and engineering: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Computer Science and Programming. The lectures included in the corpus correspond to a total class time of 397 hours, and contain 3.5 million words. As the adoption of English as the higher education medium of instruction spreads, an increasing number of NNS teachers and students may find in OnCAL useful support for their language needs.