Interdisciplinary and interlinguistic perspectives on Academic Discourse: the mode variable

International audienceThe comparative lack of interest in oral academic corpora and in comparisons between spoken and written academic discourse is surprising in that research on academic registers has found that mode differences are extremely important in accounting for linguistic variation (e.g. Biber, 2006; Swales, 2004). Spoken academic genres, such as conference presentations, display a very different range of lexico-grammatical features from written academic genres (Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2001). It was therefore with the aim of redressing this balance that the EIIDA project was created. The main rationale behind the EIIDA project4 was to create a corpus enabling the comparison of academic discourse from a triply contrastive perspective: discipline, language and mode