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Basic Information of ACE

 

Project director: Prof. Andy Kirkpatrick (Griffith University, Australia)

Project co-director: Prof. WANG Lixun (The Education University of Hong Kong)

Chief Transcriber: John Patkin

Project duration: September 2009 – October 2014

Project sub-teams and team leaders:
Hong Kong (The Education University of Hong Kong, Wang Lixun) (Original lead team)
China (Guangxi University, Ji Ke)
Malaysia (University of Malaya, Azirah Hashim and Jagdish Kaur)
Singapore (National Institute of Education, Low Eeling)
Brunei (University of Brunei, David Deterding and Salbrina Shabawi)
Philipines (Ateneo de Manila University, Isabel Martin)
Japan (Chukyo University, James DÕAngelo)
Vietnam (SEAMEO RETRAC, Ho Chi Minh City, Do Kieu Anh)
Taiwan (National Taipei College of Business, Lee Hsing-chin)

Size: 1 million words (currently, around 600,000 words are available online, as some data cannot be made publicly available due to confidentiality reasons (e.g. law court data), and some data are yet to be added due to transcription issues. We hope to add more data to the corpus in future.)

Data nature: naturally occurring, spoken, interactive ELF in Asia

Speech events: interviews; press conferences; service encounters; seminar discussions; working group discussion; workshop discussions; meetings; panels; question-and-answer sessions; conversations; etc.

Transcription software: ACE uses the same transcription software ÔVoiceScribeÕ as that developed by Professor Barbara Seidlhofer and the VOICE team (https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/), to whom a great debt of gratitude is owed and hereby acknowledged. This means that researchers will readily be able to compare data in both corpora.

Transcription conventions: ACE is tagged manually using a set of conventions developed by the VOICE team (e.g., S1 = Speaker 1; toMORrow = stressed syllable; (.) = a short pause; @ = laughter; etc.)

How to cite ACE:

ACE. 2026. The Asian Corpus of English. Director: Andy Kirkpatrick; Co-director: Lixun Wang; Researchers: John Patkin, Sophiann Subhan. https://corpus.eduhk.hk/ace/index.html (date of last access)

 

Publications related to the ACE project:

Wang, Lixun and Kirkpatrick, Andy (2024) Asian Corpus of English (ACE). In A. J. Moody (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press: 753-767.

Kirkpatrick, Andy and Wang, Lixun (2021) Is English an Asian Language? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Wang, Lixun (2021) Asian Corpus of English (ACE): Features and applications. In K. Murata (ed.), ELF Research Methods and Approaches to Data and Analyses: Theoretical and methodological underpinnings. London and New York: Routledge: 126-142.

 

Wang, Lixun (2016) Asian Corpus of English (ACE): new resource for ELF studies. In K. Murata (ed.) Waseda Working Papers in ELF, Vol. 5. Tokyo: Waseda ELF Research Group: 41-58.

Walkinshaw, Ian, Kirkpatrick, Andy and Subhan, Sophiaan (2016) English as a lingua franca in East and Southeast Asia: implications for diplomatic and intercultural communication. In P. Friedrich (ed.) English for Diplomatic Purposes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 75-93.

Gu, Michelle, Patkin, John and Kirkpatrick, Andy (2014) The dynamic identity construction in English as lingua franca intercultural communication: A positioning perspective. System. 46, 131-142.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2014) Teaching English in Asia in non-Anglo-cultural contexts: principles of the lingua franca approach. In R. Marlina and R. Giri (eds.) The Pedagogy of English as an International Language. Dordrecht: Springer: 23-34.

Kirkpatrick, Andy and Subhan, Sophiaan (2014) Non-standard or new standards or errors? The use of inflectional marking for present and past tenses in English as an Asian lingua franca. In S. Buschfeld, T. Hoffman, M. Huber and A. Kautsch et al. (eds.) The Evolution of Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 386-400.

Walkinshaw, Ian and Kirkpatrick, Andy (2014) Mutual face preservation among Asian speakers of English as a lingua franca. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 3(2): 269-291.

Kirkpatrick, Andy, Patkin, John and Wu, Jingjing (2013) The multilingual teacher and the multilingual curriculum: An Asian example of intercultural communication in the new era. In Farzad Sharifian and Maryam Jamarani (eds.) Intercultural Communication in the New Era. London: Routledge: 263-285.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2013) The Asian Corpus of English: motivation and aims. In ShinÕichiro Ishikawa (ed.) Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World. Kobe: Kobe University Press: 17-30.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2012) English as an Asian lingua franca: the lingua franca approach and implications for language education policy. Journal of English as a Lingua franca 1 (1): 121-140.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2011) English as an Asian Lingua Franca and the Multilingual Model of ELT. Language Teaching 44 (2): 212-224.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2010) English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: A Multilingual Model. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Kirkpatrick, Andy (2010) Researching English as a lingua franca in Asia: the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project. Asian Englishes, 31(1): 4-18.