Working with Concordancers

Language teaching is one of the major areas of application of corpus linguistics. It is common to distinguish direct and indirect applications of corpus studies in teaching (Leech 1997). Indirect application is usually associated with the use of concordancers in lexicography, material development and academic research, whereas direct application refers to classroom concordancing. In this talk I will look at direct classroom applications of corpora and concordancers.
I will look at classroom concordancing from two perspectives – teacher and learner - considering ways in which concordancers can be used by teachers to illustrate some particularly challenging phenomena in academic writing, and the ways in which students can develop learner autonomy through the use of concordancers.