[Corpora-List] Position at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan

[Annelie Adel]

Dear All,

Please find below a job decription for the position of Director of 
applied corpus linguistics projects in the English Language Institute at 
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The starting date for this 
research associate position is July or August, 2007.

Applicants must have a Ph.D. in Linguistics or English Linguistics, with 
a specialization in corpus linguistics. The ideal candidate should take 
an applied approach, specifically focusing on academic speech/writing 
and ELT from a corpus-based perspective. A further requirement is a 
strong research program in phraseology and the lexis-grammar interface.

Please note that we accept applications no later than March 30. To 
apply, please go to the University of Michigan Career Website 
(http://www.umich.edu/~jobs/). The job ID # is 7339.

For informal inquiries, e-mail Annelie Ädel at aadel at umich.edu.


JOB DESRIPTION
This is a combined administrative and research position involving three 
main areas of responsibility: (1) corpus project management, (2) 
research activities, and (3) general ELI applied corpus linguistic work.

The applied corpus linguistics director manages the ELI’s 
corpus-linguistics projects. These projects are large and quite diverse, 
encompassing both spoken and written academic registers. At present, 
there are two major projects, one spoken corpus, MICASE, the Michigan 
Corpus of Academic Spoken English 
(http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm), and one written corpus, 
MICUSP, the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers 
(http://www.micusp.org). While the MICASE compilation stage is 
completed, the MICUSP project still includes some data gathering and 
encoding. In addition, a third corpus project has recently been 
initiated, collecting data on the writing of students who belong to the 
so-called “Generation 1.5”, which the applied corpus linguistics 
director is also responsible for developing.

The MICASE project mainly involves administrative work, although 
enhancing the existing corpus material so as to make it maximally useful 
is also encouraged. The free accessibility of MICASE online has proven 
to be very popular and highly appreciated by users all over the world; 
recent statistics on online traffic show that in 2006, there as many as 
135,000 visits. The director needs to ensure continued online access to 
MICASE, as well as future access to MICUSP, and possibly to other 
corpora. ELI has a strong tradition of creating and maintaining 
corpus-based resources for the linguistic research community as well as 
for teachers and students worldwide.

The MICUSP material is still being compiled, and it is the 
responsibility of the director to ensure success in producing a corpus 
that is balanced with respect to disciplines and student status. While 
technical solutions are underway for data handling and TEI-compliant xml 
formatting, some technical development work remains to be done. In order 
to finalize the corpus collection, some targeted data solicitation also 
needs to be be done.

In addition to such technical corpus-linguistic work, project management 
duties include supervising a small team of part-time research 
assistants, co-supervising a postdoctoral research fellow, providing 
corpus user support, archiving, planning the budget, organizing project 
meetings, preparing grant proposals, etc.

The director is expected to conduct research based on ELI corpus 
resources, and dedicate a relatively large amount of time to preparing 
research papers and manuscripts for publication and presentation at 
conferences.

Local ELI responsibilities include informing colleagues about available 
corpus tools and supporting relevant research efforts on the part of 
visiting scholars. The dissemination of knowledge about corpora and 
corpus tools is an important task, with respect to both faculty and 
students at the ELI. Educational efforts are encouraged, especially 
support of the use of corpora and corpus tools in the classroom. The 
director is expected to take a leading role in collaborating with the 
testing and teaching divisions of the ELI, and in researching the use of 
ELI corpora as a basis for developing teaching and testing materials.