Introduction: Corpora in EMI research

This chapter points to the fact that notwithstanding the global spread of English-medium instruction (EMI) and a growing body of research into EMI in different disciplines and higher education contexts, transnational, and comparative studies on EMI that draw on large-scale cross-institutional data are extremely scarce. Hence, the TAEC Corpus was created as part of the Erasmus+ project "Transnational Alignment of English Competences for University Lecturers" (TAEC) and included data from various EMI programs at five European universities in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Croatia, respectively. The TAEC Corpus consists of classroom interaction data, comprising transcripts of 30 video recorded 90- or 120-minute lectures, and enables the cross-institutional analysis of different aspects of classroom language use, such as mediation and translanguaging, and of content teachers' oral English language proficiency. The corpus is accompanied by transcripts of 30 structured post-observation interviews through which the lecturers were asked about their experience of teaching in English, professional development for EMI, and language proficiency, policy, and use. The chapter presents the development and the characteristics of the TAEC Corpus and concludes with an overview of other chapters in the volume, in which the data gleaned from the corpus and the interviews were analyzed and discussed.