Background

ViMELF was compiled as part of The CASE project.

The CASE project: Compiling a corpus of informal English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) conversations

The CASE project was started in 2012 at Saarland University with the aim of collecting video-mediated conversations in an international English-language context and thus create a dataset or "corpus" that allows research of this particular communication type. Until 2018, teams of researchers from Germany, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Finland, France, Belgium, the UK and the US have compiled more than 250 hours of conversations using Skype as a medium. The conversations are first encounters between two participants from different countries and last between 30 and 60 minutes.

Of particular interest to us are pragmatics and discourse in a video-mediated communication setting, cultural and intercultural negotiation, issues of identity, the role of plurilingual resources, and the influence of the communication medium on issues such as rapport and cooperation in an international setting.

Conversations are transcribed according to pragmatic transcription guidelines, with the aim of allowing for a wide range of applications and in particular focusing on spoken language features, multimodality, and the use of plurilingual resources. Our team of researchers has published several papers on various aspects of the project, some of which are available online.

The recordings have been completed in 2018 with a total of more than 250 hours of data. The data has been used for various qualitative and quantitative studies.

In May 2018, ViMELF, the first finalized corpus based on data from the CASE project was released.

Project website: http://umwelt-campus.de/case