Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by the Spanish “Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad” to the research project “Metaphor use in one-to-one academic consultations in English: Implications for Spanish student mobility in Europe” (ref. FFI2011-22809) between 1st January 2012 and 31st December 2014. The dissemination of the results of this research through this website and conference presentations has been made possible by the financial support of the “Gobierno de Extremadura” through the financing awarded to the research group “Lengua Inglesa y Lingüística Aplicada” (HUM022). The team carrying out the current research project is also deeply indebted to the team of researchers who have developed the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), particularly as regards the system of transcription and annotation they have developed for their corpus of English as lingua franca conversations.

We are also grateful to the the following institutions for their collaboration at various stages in the project: Universidad de Extremadura (Spain), University of Limerick (Ireland), Birmingham University (United Kingdom), VU University Amsterdam (The Netherlands), University of Dalarna and Stockholm University (Sweden). Last but not least, we would like to thank all the students and lecturers who agreed to allow themselves to be recorded. Without your collaboration, this research would not have been possible!