ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 begins with a justification of the need to compile a corpus such as MetCLIL. Thus, MetCLIL is not only tagged for metaphor, but it also includes speech events from a geographic area, i.e., Southern Europe, underrepresented in the existing ELF corpora. Given its size (110,493 words), MetCLIL falls under the category of what the literature has called “small specialised corpora” (cf. Koester, 2020), whose most important feature is that they are used to investigate specific research objectives. The chapter also contains a brief overview of the subject matter, methodology (e.g., groupings, activities) and other contextual factors that may be helpful in understanding the specific interaction taking place in the seminars. The next section offers a quantitative description of the participants in the seminars (no. 147) by paying attention to their different roles (lecturer vs students), their demographic data (e.g., their home countries, mother tongues, etc.) as well as their L2 language level and history. The following section, which provides an assessment of how naturally participants express themselves in the speech event, is offered on the basis of a survey conducted at the time of the recording. Checking for the quality of the corpus gathers is indeed a necessary task. The chapter finishes with an explanation of the features and functionalities offered by the Sketch Engine platform, to which the corpus has been uploaded.
