Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
MICASE is a great resource for the ESL/EAP classroom, to help make your lessons more authentic and more effective for your students. If you are teaching English, you may have noticed that some of the examples of dialogues and role-plays in your textbooks are overly formal or sound staged. These types of materials may not prepare students for what they will actually hear in real academic contexts. Learn how to use MICASE to give your students great listening activities, authentic role-plays, and accurate contextual examples for the new vocabulary they are learning.
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 MICASE project.
The online search interface can be a valuable support tool for teaching English, but it can be tricky to use at first. Learn how to use MICASE Online with video demos, search tips and more.
Order the transcripts, sound files, and handbook. They are great supplementary materials for your classroom.
Lessons and activities using real MICASE dialogue, focusing on everything from new vocabulary to conversation skills.
Interactive lessons for your students to do on their own.
The sound files for many of our MICASE transcripts are available here for you to use in your classroom. They provide great examples of authentic speech!
These small research projects give you a look into the way people are talking in academic settings- everything from how people introduce speakers, to when they exaggerate.
Explanation of tags, colors, punctuation, and other mark-ups used in our transcripts.
Our how-to use MICASE information complied into one downloadable document.
How is MICASE being used in the field of teaching?
A list of publications, presentations and teaching materials using MICASE (1999-present).
MICASE is a great resource for the ESL/EAP classroom, to help make your lessons more authentic and more effective for your students.
MICUSP is a corpus of advanced student writing from 16 disciplines at the University of Michigan.
Use the transcripts from the JSCC to help your students master the art of conference presentations or just improve their general presentation skills.
This project aims to identify the writing patterns and preferences of international students, as well as Generation 1.5 writers.
On these pages you find information about our research activities and training we provide in corpus analysis.