This corpus contains 429,048 words. This paper first briefly describes the possible ways of using the wordlisting function in the concordancing package Wordsmith to help students gain a better understanding of the report-writing genre. It then focuses on ways of employing the concordancing function in Wordsmith to help students improve vocabulary selection, command of syntactical structure, and use of idiomatic expressions in report writing. Almost every type of list can be employed to help student writing . Word length and paragraph length lists, for example, can be used to improve students' understanding of the genre of report writing.
Most students understand report writing to be a type of formal academic writing.
By comparing the lists of words and paragraph length in student reports with those of published reports, we can more easily demonstrate this key point to students. Wordlisting can also help improve students' awareness of the problem of overuse of certain groups of words. In the project described in this paper, the concordancing function of Wordsmith plays a much more important role than does the wordlist function. It allows students to raise their awareness about deviant syntactical structures, use of idioms, and vocabulary usage within the genre of report writing. The paper first presents findings from concordancing, and then goes on to discuss the ways these findings can be applied in ESL research and teaching.