NESSI: A multimodal corpus of New Englishes

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

In this poster, I would like to present a project aimed at collecting a multimodal corpus of non-native English. While corpora of non-native English (and of non-native language varieties in general) have become quite common over the last twenty years or so, most of them represent written or (less often) spoken data, and hardly ever include multimodal data (one exception being the Corpus of Academic Spoken English, see Diemer et al. 2016). Yet, because body language is an important aspect of language learning (Brown 2007), it is essential to find out more about how non-native speakers use body language, and how this compares with native behaviour. Multimodal corpora of naturally-occurring language constitute an ideal source of information about this. In addition, such corpora arguably give access to more cognitive aspects of language (cf. Cienki 2013), which might prove useful to understand processes of second language acquisition. The corpus, called NESSI (New Englishes Student Interviews), will include multimodal data representing institutionalised second-language varieties of English. It will thus make it possible to investigate non-verbal communicative competence in New Englishes. A first component of the corpus has already been collected, namely the Hong Kong component. It is made up of 50 interviews with university students majoring in English. Each interview consists of three tasks: a set topic, a free discussion and a picture description. In addition to the purely linguistic transcriptions and annotations, the corpus will be annotated for gestures. The poster will describe the subcorpus and the planned stages of annotation, as well as the expected benefits of this resource for the field of multimodal communication. I will also briefly present some other advantages of the resource, including its rich metadata (sociolinguistic variables) and its comparability with LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage; Gilquin et al. 2010) which allows for comparisons between second and foreign varieties of English (cf. Mukherjee & Hundt 2011).