Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
MICASE is a corpus of spoken English is a unique collection of a large number of speech events recorded at a large American research university, and has been a source of study for researchers in a wide variety of fields since the late 1990s. MICASE has produced myriad interesting findings in areas such as Discourse Analysis, Syntax, Semantics, and EAP Teaching.
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.
The history, purpose, and ideas behind the corpus of academic speech.
Discover all the features of the online searchable database. Get help with filtering and narrowing your searches, reading concordance results, and understanding the mark-up of our transcripts.
Order the transcripts, sound files, and the handbook here.
The sound files for many of our MICASE transcripts are available here, organized by speech event type.
These findings using MICASE data, give us a glimpse into the world of academic speech.
Explanation of tags, colors, punctuation, and other mark-ups used in our online transcripts, as well as word counts and number of transcripts by categories.
Our how-to use MICASE information complied into one downloadable document.
How is MICASE being used by applied linguists in these fields?
A list of publications, presentations and teaching materials using MICASE (1999-present).
MICASE is a corpus of spoken English is a unique collection of a large number of speech events recorded at a large American research university.
MICUSP is a corpus of advanced student writing from 16 disciplines at the University of Michigan.
The JSCC is a small corpus of conference transcripts, made available for the study of academic discourse in specialized contexts.
This project is the first larger scale empirical study of Generation 1.5 writers.
On these pages you find information about our research activities and training we provide in corpus analysis.