The MICASE Handbook : A Resource for Users of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English

A corpus collects relevant data on how language is actually used, which has implications for teaching, course development, and textbooks. The Micase Corpus tracked spoken English in a variety of university settings - lectures, language labs, advising sessions, department meetings, etc. "The Micase Handbook" consists of a set of abstracts of each of the 152 speech events in the original MICASE database.

The abstracts, ranging from 150 to 350 words, provide contextual background on each of the speech events of the corpus so that teachers can get a quick overview of content and important interactional features of each event. These summaries are useful both for interpreting utterances in a transcript and assessing the potential usefulness for pedagogical or research purposes. This book is geared toward post - secondary level second language teachers who have already used MICASE in the classroom or are interested in incorporating such a corpus into their teaching materials.

It is also intended for corpus linguists and discourse analysts who use MICASE for research purposes and want more contextual information than is accessible from short extracts.