Monoconc Pro and Wordsmith Tools

REVIEW OF MONOCONCPRO AND WORDSMITH TOOLS Title MonoCone Pro Version 2.0 Developer Platform PC Hardware/ System Windows 95 or higher Requirements Program Information Publisher Athelstan info@athel.com Support On-line help and a small manual Languages Can be used with different languages Audience Beginning to advanced users ISBN not applicable Price US $85 single user; US $550 15 user site Title WordSmith Tools Version 3.0 Developer Mike Scot Platform PC Hardware/ Minimum 80386 processor, VGA display System or better, Windows 3.1x or Windows 95, Requirements minimum 4 MB RAM (8 MB if used with Windows 95). Program http://www.oup. com:8080/elt/global/catal Information ogue/multimedia/wordsmithtools3/ Publisher Oxford University Press Support On-line help and an extensive manual Languages Can be used with different languages Audience Beginning to advanced users ISBN 0-19-45-92863 Price 51.95 British pounds The recent interest in corpus linguistics and the use of authentic materials has created a need for software packages that allow teachers and researchers to carry out corpus-based investigations. These corpus-based investigations can be used to augment classroom instruction so that ESL/EFL students are exposed to real language rather than artificial texts and made-up examples. Teachers and researchers can also begin to explore some of the more subtle areas of language use where our intuitions often lead us in the wrong direction. In this review, I will take a close look at WordSmith Tools (Version 3) and MonoConc Pro (Version 2), two of the more readily available and reasonably priced packages for working with corpora, in order to contrast the different options that they offer teachers and researchers. As with any software purchase, the needs of the user should play a key role in deciding which program is most appropriate. Both programs include many of the same features, such as the ability to create word lists (in both alphabetical order and frequency order), generate concordance output, and give collocation information. Both programs easily handle large corpora and work with either tagged or untagged texts. As with any software package, the user needs to check the default settings (e.g., minimum or maximum number of hits displayed) to make certain that they are set according to the users' desires. In the following paragraphs, I describe the major features shared by the two programs as well as some of the more specialized features offered by only one or the other. One of the major innovations of these packages is that they allow users to analyze any collection of ASCII texts. This is in marked contrast to earlier concordancing packages which required the user to build a database of texts before using the program for analyses. This was usually an elaborate process, and sometimes required sending texts to the software author or publisher before the concordancing tools could be used. Further, the database normally could not be modified once it was constructed. Thus, the database needed to be rebuilt any time additional texts were added. WordSmith and MonoConc Pro differ from these earlier packages in that they allow the user to select any group of texts for analysis every time the system is started. Better yet, additional texts can be added "on the fly," so that the corpus being analyzed can be tailored to directly fit the immediate research questions. The primary research use of both software packages is to generate concordances, or listings of all the occurrences of any given word in a given text, with words shown in context. Concordance listings can be useful for exploring the use and meanings of specific words. Often when looking at concordance lines, users may want to expand the context so that they can get a better sense of the meaning or use. …