| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 7-12 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 August 2026 |
| Received: 13 June 2026 / Received in Revised Form: 13 July 2026 / Accepted: 15 August 2026 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2026.7.1.7
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The British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE): Compilation, Research Applications, and AntConc-based Pedagogy
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| Young Ok Jong (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), SOUTH KOREA; Chae Kwan Jung (Incheon National University), SOUTH KOREA |
| Copyright 2026 APJCR This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| This article reexamines the British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE) as a resource for research on university lectures and seminars and corpus-based language education. Drawing on the BASE manual, corpus documentation, and five representative studies, it reviews BASE’s compilation, disciplinary balance, transcription conventions, versions, research applications, and pedagogical potential. The official release contains 1,644,942 tokens from 160 lectures and 39 seminars recorded at two British universities between 1998 and 2005. The review shows that BASE supports research on lexical bundles, pragmatic functions of just, relevance markers, lexical coverage, and tag questions, linking vocabulary, discourse organization, and lecturer-student interaction. Its strengths include coverage of four disciplinary domains, inclusion of both lectures and seminars, and annotation of speaker and nonverbal information. However, differences among the original XML files, research-specific datasets, and platform versions affect document and token counts. Uneven annotation, limited seminar data, normalized transcription, and restriction to two institutions constrain interpretation. Three AntConc activities are proposed: comparing just across lectures and seminars, contrasting BASE with MICASE, and analyzing relevance markers. The article argues that BASE remains valuable when researchers document versions and preprocessing decisions and treat findings as evidence about particular British academic settings rather than academic speech in general. |
Keywords |
| British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE), Academic Spoken English, Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis, AntConc, Data-Driven Learning |
References |
| Anthony, L. (2026). AntConc (Version 4.4.2) [Computer software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Retrieved July 20, 2026, from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/AntConc
Corpus Resource Database. (2014). British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE). VARIENG, University of Helsinki. Retrieved June 2, 2026, from https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/ corpora/BASE/ Dang, T. N. Y., & Webb, S. (2014). The lexical profile of academic spoken English. English for Specific Purposes, 33, 66-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2013.08.001 Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). “Just remember this”: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31(4), 221-233. Grant, L. E. (2011). The frequency and functions of just in British academic spoken English. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(3), 183-197. Nesi, H., & Basturkmen, H. (2006). Lexical bundles and discourse signalling in academic lectures. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11(3), 283-304. Nesi, H., & Thompson, P. (2006). The British Academic Spoken English Corpus manual. Universities of Warwick and Reading. Retrieved June 2, 2026, from https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/ research/collections/base/history/base_ manual.pdf Sketch Engine. (2025). British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE). Retrieved August 7, 2026, from https://www.sketchengine.eu/british-academic-spoken-english-corpus/ Thompson, P., & Nesi, H. (2001). The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project. Language Teaching Research, 5(3), 263-264. University of Michigan English Language Institute. (2026). The Michigan corpora: MICASE + MICUSP. Retrieved July 7, 2026, from https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.html Wei, L., Leung, A. H.-C., & Sun, Y. (2023). “We don’t normally require that in other contexts, do we”: Interpersonal meanings of tag questions in British university seminars based on the BASE corpus. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 1070937. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1070937 |
The Author |
| Young Ok Jong is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Foreign Language Education, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. She holds an MSc in English Language Teaching from the University of Warwick and an MSc in Child Development and Education from the University of Oxford. She earned her EdD in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from the University of Warwick. She is the author of Effective Approaches to Teaching English Writing: A Hybrid English Writing Model (2013). Her research interests include corpus linguistics, genre-based writing pedagogy, and process approaches to writing instruction.
Chae Kwan Jung is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Incheon National University, South Korea. He holds a BEng (Hons) in Manufacturing Engineering and Japanese from the University of Birmingham, UK, and an MSc in Engineering Business Management and an EdD in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from the University of Warwick, UK. He is the founder of the Institute for Corpus Research (ICR) and the founding editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research (APJCR). His research interests include corpus linguistics, English language education, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), language assessment, and curriculum design and development. His current interests include data-driven learning, AI-assisted language pedagogy and translation, and the application of ESP-informed genre- and corpus-based approaches to language teaching and learning. |
The Author’s Address |
| First Author Young Ok Jong Visiting Research Fellow Institute of Foreign Language Education Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 107 Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 02450, SOUTH KOREA E-mail: yojong@gmail.comCorresponding Author Chae Kwan Jung Professor Department of English Language & Literature Incheon National University 119 Academy-ro, Yeonsu-gu, Incheon, 22012, SOUTH KOREA E-mail: ckjung@inu.ac.kr |
