Class notes prepared by Phil Benson , English Centre, April 1997. Text sources Reading Perspectives Concordancing software allows you to search a collection of texts stored on computer and display all the instances of a chosen word or words in their contexts. Concordancing is used by linguistic and applied linguistic researchers to explore the meanings and uses of words in authentic contexts of use. When concordancing is used in research, it is usually called 'corpus linguistics'. The word 'corpus' usually refers to a collection of texts that has been assembled in a principled way in order to represent a certain kind of language.
Learners take on the role of researchers.
Learners often come up with answers that teachers cannot predict in advance. This is a good place to begin to learn about concordancing in language teaching. Look especially at the paper-based materials in the Virtual DDL Library . Here is an example of a vocabulary teaching handout on Internet Neologisms prepared by Tim Johns. Three of the most commonly used concordance programmes for language teaching.