A corpus-driven approach to identifying discipline-specific metaphorical vocabulary for Japanese university English-medium instruction programs

2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K00863
• Research Institution: University of Niigata Prefecture
• Principal Investigator: ベネット フィリップ 新潟県立大学, 国際地域学部, 准教授 (70601714)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2023-03-31
• Keywords: corpora / EMI / metaphor

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

I made a call for participants to share course materials or lecture recordings for the corpus. I received a large amount of spoken data, which will be valuable, although transcription will take time. I identified the reference corpora for my study and began compiling data for analysis. I continued adding to the corpus of English Medium Instruction materials, expanding the data to almost 2,000,000 tokens. I also identified four disciplines to be the focus of the metaphor analysis. These will be Applied Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, and International Relations. I found a researcher to be a second rater in the metaphor analysis. Overall, the research has made good progress, and I am optimistic that my findings will help to highlight specialised use of high frequency and academic vocabulary in EMI courses.

Current Status of Research Progress

2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.

Reason

Corpus construction has proceeded smoothly. Owing to the pandemic, I was able to obtain more spoken data than expected, which will be useful. However, transcribing spoken data takes considerable time, so I will probably have to limit myself to a sample of the spoken recordings.
Because of the time taken to code spoken data, I have not begun the metaphor analysis yet. However, I have identified the main academic disciplines that I will focus on for the analysis of metaphor use. I have also made arrangements with an experienced researcher to act as a second rater for my study.
I have submitted an application to present the preliminary findings of the study at a domestic conference in the autumn of this year.

Strategy for Future Research Activity

During the spring of 2021, I will carry out my own metaphor analysis and have a second rater code a sample of my work to establish reliability measures.
I will use the findings of my metaphor analysis to guide an investigation into the use of related metaphorical vocabulary using both my own corpus of EMI materials and my reference corpora.
I will develope a short presentation of my preliminary findings for presentation in the autumn of this year.

Causes of Carryover

In the original proposal, I requested funding for a research assistant to help with the scanning of texts. However, due to the Coronavirus outbreak, most participants who submitted data for my study were using electronic texts which did not need to be scanned. The materials that required scanning were scanned by the lead researcher.