The Project

This website is devoted, in the first instance, to the dissemination of the results of a three-year research project into the use of metaphor in office hours’ consultations involving Spanish undergraduate students. These students were spending a period of time on an ERASMUS grant at a university in another European country (Ireland, England, Sweden, and The Netherlands) where English is the medium of instruction.

27 Spanish undergraduate students from different universities and academic disciplines were video-recorded in conversation with their lecturers. The resulting 5 hours and 47 minutes of conversation was subsequently transcribed and form what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first corpus of office hours’ consultations carried out in English as academic lingua franca.

The project aims to gather many more hours of recordings of office hours’ consultations between students and lecturers at different European universities, focusing on those involving international students spending a period of time studying abroad. The transcriptions of these consultations (which will include those carried out in other European languages) will form the basis of a multilingual corpus of office hours’ consultations across Europe.