EuroCoAT. The European Corpus of Academic Talk.

This corpus is the result is a three-year research project into the use of metaphor in office hours’ consultations involving Spanish undergraduate students. These students were spending a period of time on an ERASMUS grant at a university in another European country (Ireland, England, Sweden, and The Netherlands) where English is the medium of instruction.

It aims to contribute to the knowledge about office hours’ consultations and the kind of conversations that lecturers have with students from other European universities, with whom they most often do not share the same mother tongue or the same cultural background – which includes, of course, their understanding of university life, the teaching and learning activities that take place there or the systems used to assess students’  academic progress and achievement.

These recordings were made between April 2012 and February 2013 in the four countries mentioned above. We hope that the data made available through this website will prove of use to other researchers interested in metaphor, academic discourse, or intercultural communication more generally.