INTRODUCTION

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of the Japanese Government has launched the Global 30 Program in 2010 to encourage Japanese universities to offer education in English. For a professor who is not a native speaker, talking about his/her own research topics in English is not so difficult because the “presentation” is a genre that is already familiar to him/her, is usually not very long, and can be well prepared. However, teaching in English seems to be extremely difficult to many non-native speakers, because most of them have no experience of having taught in English, and sometimes neither of even having been taught in English, so that the “lecture in English” genre is not familiar to them. In addition, teaching a subject in Japanese universities, for example, means giving classes of 90 minutes through fifteen consecutive weeks, and this also makes the issue even heavier.

OnCAL, the Online Corpus of Academic Lectures, has emerged with the purpose of offering support not only to Japanese but also to all non-native researchers or university teachers of any country that need/want to teach content in English. And, because the project was conceived at the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, the first release (March, 2010) of OnCAL contains transcriptions of lectures delivered to students in the field of science and engineering. In the first release, the corpus comprises transcriptions made available online by MIT OCW (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Opencourseware), and SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere). The transcripts were edited only when necessary for consistency along all texts, like in changing all “OK” into “okay”, or in making all descriptions appear as tags, like in “[LAUGHS]”. The lectures chosen for the first release are mainly delivered to undergraduate first and second year students. Later, lectures delivered to undergraduate senior and graduate school students will also be added. Furthermore, the possibility of including lectures given in different fields, like humanities, will be considered.

We hope that OnCAL will be found useful by a broad audience. First of all, non-native content teachers, as mentioned above, will be able to get some help. In addition, non-native students preparing to study abroad will also benefit. Teachers of English as a Second Language can also explore this corpus and get ideas. Finally, applied linguists that want to analyze the language used in lectures and compare to the language used in other genres can see OnCAL as a useful resource.

The interface was designed to be as user friendly and intuitive as possible. We offer some help pages, but we expect that users will be able to easily find out how the tools work by just trying out. Lists of lectures including information about the teachers are available.

Nilson Kunioshi, Waseda University
Judy Noguchi, Mukogawa Women’s University
Kazuko Tojo, Osaka Jogakuin Univesrsity

(Programmed by SkillUp Japan Co. Ltd.)