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

2022 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K00863
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 02100:Foreign language education-related
• Research Institution: University of Niigata Prefecture
• Principal Investigator: Bennett Phillip 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 Final Research Achievements

During the time I have been receiving kaken funding, I have built a 2-million-word corpus of materials from English as a Medium of Instruction courses in 5 Japanese universities. The corpus contains both spoken (16%) and written (84%) data, and is 4 times larger than the corpus used in my prior study in this area.
I have taken samples of data from this corpus for four academic disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, and Political Science - 50,000-word samples each) and manually coded them for the presence of metaphorical vocabulary. I enlisted a second rater who is also familiar with the metaphor coding procedure to establish the reliability of the codings.
I then used these codings to calculate estimates of the rate at which learners in EMI programs are likely to encounter metaphorical vocabulary. I also identified prominent metaphorical themes in each of the four disciplines and estimated the proportion of all metaphors that these comprise.

Free Research Field

Vocabulary acquisition

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

Most vocabulary instruction is focused on the teaching of basic or literal word definitions, and little attention is paid to how highly-frequent words often take on extended meanings. My hope is that my research findings will help to encourage a broader understanding of lexical development.