Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
Use MICASE Online to look up words and phrases that you have trouble with or don’t understand. MICASE is not a dictionary, and will not give you definitions. Instead, you can see the way a word was used in context by real English speakers. We also have great activities to help you practice listening and understanding academic conversations.
The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech (almost 200 hours of recordings) from the University of Michigan (U-M) in Ann Arbor, created by researchers and students at the U-M English Language Institute (ELI). MICASE contains data from a wide range of speech events (including lectures, classroom discussions, lab sections, seminars, and advising sessions) and locations across the university.
The recommended MICASE citation is: Simpson, R. C., S. L. Briggs, J. Ovens, and J. M. Swales. (2002) The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.
MICASE online is a great tool to help you learn the English language. Learn how to search for words and phrases that you may be having trouble with.
Learn important words and phrases while listening to sound clips to hear the correct pronunciation. Then answer questions about how you would use the new vocabulary.
The sound files for many of our MICASE recordings are available here for you to listen to. They provide great examples of authentic speech and help you improve your listening skills!
These small research projects give you a look into the way people are talking in academic settings. Do you for example know how professors correct themselves after they have misspoken?
When you look at our transcripts of conversations, they don’t look like they are written in standard English. Learn what the colors and punctuation mean, and how they can help you.
Use MICASE Online to look up words and phrases that you have trouble with or don’t understand.
Need help with your writing? MICUSP gives you great examples of well written papers (they all got an A or A-) from 16 different departments, so you can improve your writing skills.
If you need to present your paper in English at a conference, or you just want to improve your presentation skills, click here.
If you are an undergraduate Korean or Chinese student, you can help us with an important study by submitting an essay you have already written. Click on Contribute to Generation 1.5 below.
On these pages you find information about our research activities and training we provide in corpus analysis.