Designing and building SCoPE2: A spoken corpus of Brazilian Portuguese and L2-English

Abstract

This paper presents the process of designing and building a bilingual spoken corpus in order to pragmatically analyse oral L2-English discourse produced by a group of Brazilian university students living in Ireland. It discusses some of the decisions made, challenges faced, and considerations taken while designing a do-it-yourself corpus with a theoretical framework grounded in Corpus Pragmatics. The main objective is to share the lessons learned by examining the steps of designing and building SCoPE², a bilingual spoken corpus, including the selection of participants, gathering data, and challenges in transcribing and coding spoken language with pragmatics in mind.