MEMIC
MEMIC is a corpus of digitally mediated spoken interactions conducted in English as the medium of instruction (EMI), drawn from 24 university seminars in the social sciences. The corpus can be searched by communication register, including teacher talk, student talk, and online chat. In addition, it has been annotated for communicative functions, enabling users to explore a wide range of language functions, such as expressing opinions, providing input, summarising, thanking, apologising etc. A detailed description of the corpus compilation and annotation procedures, along with the list of language functions, is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2026.103999
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Sylvia Jaworska for providing the data.
Part-of-speech tagset and lemmatization
The English Web Corpora are part-of-speech tagged with the following English Penn Treebank tagset summary (with Sketch Engine modifications) indicating the part of speech and grammatical category. The corpus texts also contain lemmatization when each word form from the corpus is assigned to its base form (lemma).
MEMIC corpus sizes
| Number of words | 26+ thousand |
| Number of tokens | 35+ thousand |
| Number of sentences | 2+ thousand |
| Number of web pages | 24 |
Search the MEMIC
Sketch Engine offers a range of tools to work with this English corpus.
Tools to work with the MEMIC corpus from the web
A complete set of Sketch Engine tools is available to work with this English corpus to generate:
- word sketch – English collocations categorized by grammatical relations
- thesaurus – synonyms and similar words for every word
- keywords – terminology extraction of one-word and multi-word units
- word lists – lists of English nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. organized by frequency
- n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
- concordance – examples in context
- text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus
Changelog
MEMIC
version memic_3 (November 2026)
- published in Sketch Engine as open corpus
Bibliography
Sylvia Jaworska, Katherine Halley, Fumiyo Nakatsuhara, Chihiro Inoue, Takumi Uchihara, Parvaneh Tavakoli, Akiko Kiyota, Mohd Ridhwan Abdullah,
Building a corpus of digitally mediated EMI classroom interactions: challenges and opportunities for EMI research and pedagogy,
System,
Volume 139,
2026,
103999,
ISSN 0346-251X,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2026.103999.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0346251X26000308)
Abstract: While research on English-medium instruction (EMI) has grown considerably in recent years, we still know relatively little about what happens inside EMI classrooms, particularly in terms of interactional practices. There remains a shortage of empirical resources, such as corpora, that can offer systematic insights into the features of EMI classroom discourse. This paper addresses some of the gaps by outlining the methodological and ethical procedures involved in building and annotating a corpus of digitally mediated EMI interactions, drawn from 24 university seminars in the social sciences across two EMI contexts. Using the Multimodal EMI Corpus (MEMIC) as a case study, we demonstrate how such a resource can be used to examine lexical and discursive features of EMI interaction across modes and registers. We also show how these insights can inform the development of EMI-relevant teaching materials and assessment tasks. The overarching aim of this contribution is to encourage other scholars and practitioners to collect and analyse data from their own local EMI contexts, in order to advance corpus-based research into EMI classroom practices and support more effective, evidence-informed pedagogy.
Keywords: Digital classroom interactions; English as a medium of instruction (EMI); Corpus; Multimodality; Annotation; Language functions; Responsible research
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