The main goal of BraCES Project is to construct an ethnographic-linguistic corpus of interactions of English and Spanish produced in Brazil in order to base research with the most varied objectives. The idea is to have empirical data enough to make language analyses focused on what the speakers produce and how intelligibility is constructed. as a matter of fact, we aim at motivating different and varied research about LF in Brazil and establishing a scientific dialogue with other scholars around the world who are also concerned with Lingua Franca.
So the Project is basically ethnographic as it focuses on the development of LF phenomenon instead of testing hypotheses or providing prescriptions (COGO; DEWEY, 2012). The recordings we make available in this site were collected in a sociolinguistic scenario which reflects a use of the language as natural as it is possible among speakers from different nationalities.
In order to make the collection possible, we have chosen some different contexts for data collection, which may be included in the data so far:
a) Language Practice Group: A group of volunteers who get together twice a week at Federal University of Bahia campus with the goal of speaking English and meeting students from other countries. The group does not have any kind of learning or teaching goal during the interactions, which makes this context very interesting for research. Actually, they get together in order to provide opportunities to discuss different topics using different foreign languages. We will be focused on how interactions of English and Spanish are recorded and transcribed little by little.
b) Pedagogical meetings in bilingual schools in Salvador: one context in which people from different nationalities get all together for interactions is in bilingual schools. In this context, teachers from different origins interact with each other to discuss problems and routine of the school. We have collected very few interactions from these contexts so far and they are already available for research on this site.
c) Local and casual interactions around the city, in a tourism context. Some interactions are recorded by the researchers involved whenever they feel there are people from different nationalities trying to communicate. Also, very few interactions from this context have been recorded and they are already available on our site.