The MWSWeb Project: Accessing medical discourse in video hosting websites

Abstract

Video corpora are one form of specialised corpora that can be used to promote the use of video-hosting sites, such as YouTube and Dailymotion, in domain specific university language learning courses. The article reports the experiences of a group of researchers, working in a variety of roles and from different perspectives, to promote the use of videos hosted on such sites in English for Medical Purposes (EMP) courses. The article describes how the MWSWEB platform modifies access to such sites in ways compatible with corpus-based exploration of domain-specific videos thereby encouraging university students to build their own video corpora under the guidance of their teachers.