ACE is a corpus of naturally occurring spoken English
used as a lingua franca (ELF). The great majority of participants
are Asians, primarily from the countries of East and Southeast Asia, who are using English to communicate with each other in
natural settings. ACE which comprises about one million words
(equivalent to about 110 hours of recorded data) will be officially
launched at two conferences later in 2014. The European launch
will take place at The English as a Lingua Franca Conference being
held in Athens 7-10 September and the Asian launch will be
at the ACELT conference, hosted by Ateneo de Manila University,
October 21-22. Nine teams in eight countries are involved in
the ACE project, namely: