The ELISA Project -- Authentic Audio and Much More!

The ELISA Project (English Language Interview Corpus as a Second-Language Application) was developed at the University of Tuebingen (Dept. of Applied English Linguistics, AEL) and the University of Surrey (Dept. of Languages and Translation Studies, LTS) as a resource for language learning and teaching. It provides learners of English with a Web-based resource for genuine English-language oral interviews containing pragmatic information.

It is a very valuable resource because it incorporates multisensoray data (i.e., videos and transcripts). It contains approximately 15 audio interviews with native speakers of English from the United States, Britain, Australia, and Ireland concerning their work and professional careers.


Suggested Activities

1. Use the videos to practice sounds, gather pragmatic information, improve students' oral and listening comprehension skills.
   
2. Use the videos to raise students' awareness of L2 pragmatic competence.
   
3. Use the transcripts to design exercises or to assist your learners' comprehension of the audio.
4. Teach your students how to search interviews by topic, access word frequency lists for each interview, browse prepared concordances for attested words, search the interviews for KWIC (key words in context) concordances of any chosen word/phrase. Or use these features to select the videos that match the level and learning objectives of your course.
   
5. Ask students to complete the interview-based exercises in the website.
6. Use the interview metadata for discussions of cultural norms, and learn about the duration of the interview.