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The English as a Lingua Franca in Japan (ELFJ) Corpus is the product of a five-year research project, which was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18K00753.(本研究は JSPS 科研費 JP18K00753 の助成を受けたものです) . The project team, and creators of the ELFJ Corpus, consisted of the principal investigator, Blagoja Dimoski, and co-investigators, Satomi Kuroshima, Yuri Jody Yujobo, Tricia Okada, and Rasami Chaikul, all of whom are affiliated with the Center for English as a Lingua Franca at Tamagawa University.

The ELFJ Corpus contains 19 naturally occurring online conversations (conducted via Zoom) between Tamagawa University students and foreign interlocutors consisting of eight different nationalities. The transcripts and audio of each conversation can be accessed in the corpus. Each conversation is approximately 20 minutes in length. In total, the corpus contains 28,956 words and 6 hours and 39 minutes of audio. Other features of the corpus include dialogue information, participant information, lexical analysis based on word lists and ngrams, and an advanced search function that allows users to browse the corpus for specific word items using multiple filters. A list of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about the corpus is also available for users.

At the time of its launch in 2023, no other Japan-based ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) corpus was available. In this regard, the ELFJ Corpus is the first of its kind. The creators of the corpus hope it will be of benefit to researchers and educators, both in Japan and abroad, who have an interest in investigating or learning more about the linguistically and culturally rich ELF interactions between Japanese and non-Japanese participants.

• ELFJ Corpus