Teaching With Concordances
By Katherine Moran, e-mail: kate.moran@gmail.com, and Luciana Diniz, e-mail: esllsdx@langate.gsu.edu
A concordancer is a common feature of software programs designed to analyze a corpus ( a collection of whole texts stored in a database). When a user searches for a word in a corpus, the concordancer returns all the occurrences of the word within its context of use. The list of examples is called Key Words in Context (KWIC). Because the concordancers show so many examples in the context of the same word, language students are likely to deduce the meaning and patterns of the word. Furthermore, many of the grammatical features of a word (e.g., the preposition that follows it) are immediately clear if one analyzes several examples of the word. The contexts can be displayed in a line or in a sentence or paragraph.
Corpus-based concordances can be an effective tool for second language learning (Hunston, 2002; Sinclair, 2004). By analyzing concordance lines, for example, students are encouraged to investigate their own questions and therefore become more independent learners. Some of the primary benefits of concordance lines in language learning include promoting students' autonomy and helping them become responsible for their own learning.
Corpus linguistics methods, particularly those using the concordancing feature available for most corpora, are undoubtedly powerful tools for language teaching and learning in general, but especially for L2 writing. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, corpus-based pedagogical materials are not widely available or used by teachers and learners in both ESL and EFL contexts (Hunston, 2002; Sinclair, 2004). Partially because of the dearth of materials, teachers are often unaware of how to effectively incorporate the benefits of corpus-based concordances into their instructional modules. This article aims to bridge this gap between theory and practice in corpus linguistics by providing a hands-on framework for teachers to use when helping their students work with concordance lines.
The Framework
The framework consists of four steps to help students move from teacher-guided investigation to independent practice and pattern recognition.
Step 1: Activating schema
This first step is intended to highlight the knowledge students already have. Having students think about and discuss their knowledge of the target form prepares them for the next step.
Step 2: Investigating
In this phase, students are presented with a list of concordance lines from appropriate corpora containing the target feature. Students examine the use of the target form in the concordance lines and compare the actual usage with their perceived usage discussed in step 1.
The teacher can make some choices when presenting the concordance lines to the students, depending on their level of language proficiency as well as their familiarity with the tool. For an advanced class already accustomed to using a corpus in their learning, the teacher can ask the students themselves to find the target word(s) in the concordancer. For a less advanced class, however, we would recommend that the teacher preselect the concordance lines that make the learning objective more salient.
Step 3: Guiding analysis
This step is intended to help students recognize usage patterns that are present in the concordance lines. By noticing patterns in use, students can form general rules for using the target form.
Step 4: Follow-up
After students have discovered a pattern or a rule, the follow-up gives them an opportunity to practice using the target form in a meaningful way, which helps students internalize the pattern or rule they discovered in the previous steps.
Example Activity
The following example demonstrates how this framework operates with an actual activity. The objective is to raise students' awareness of the negative context of the words that usually follow the verb commit.
Step 1: Activating schema
In this first step, the students are asked to write down (individually or in pairs) five words that they directly associate with the verb commit. The teacher can ask the students to think in terms of who commits what.
Step 2: Investigating
After students are provided with concordance lines, they check whether the words that they associated with commit are similar to the ones they predicted. The following sample lines were taken from the Brown Corpus, available online through http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance/WWWConcappE.htm. The Brown Corpus was used for this activity because the corpus is composed primarily of spoken and written American English texts. Many other resources are available online, and the teacher must select one appropriate for the objectives of the class. For example, if students are focusing on learning academic writing, it is important that they use concordance lines taken from an academic writing corpus. The appendix of this article contains a list of free online concordancers.
Here are six sample concordance lines for this activity (online, a more complete context-even the entire paragraph-can be found by clicking on each target word in each line).
ual may find it possible, say, to commit adultery not only without personal
ired strength, bravado, daring to commit murder. "That worm a murderer? Ridi
Whoever is born of God does not commit sin [That is, he does not practice
, said he "do you think people who commit suicide go to heaven"? and she ans
omorrow. Also our plans for me to commit Charlie's murder and for him to com
es known, people might hire us to commit crimes for them." "Delightful,"
Step 3: Guiding analysis
The teacher asks the students if they find something in common among the words that follow commit. If students are going in a wrong direction, the teacher can ask more direct questions, such as, "Do the words that follow commit have a positive or a negative meaning?" or "Can you commit happiness or birthday parties? Why?"
Step 4: Follow-up
In this phase, students are provided with many words with positive and negative meanings (e.g., suicide, happiness, love, murder). They are asked which of these words can follow commit.
Conclusion
The framework provided in the article can be easily adapted for a wide range of language teaching points including vocabulary acquisition, differences in synonym use, usage variation in register or genre, preposition choice, semantic prosody, or word connotation (see Tribble & Jones, 1997, for several ideas on how to use concordances in the classroom). As previously stated, teachers can preselect concordance lines to assist lower proficiency levels or to make a language feature more salient.
Appendix
Some useful free concordancers
• British National Corpus (BNC), http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
• Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase
• Collins Concordance Sampler, http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
• Compleat Lexical Tutor, http://132.208.224.131/concordancers/concord_e.html
• Childes Language Date Exchange System, http://childes.psy.cmu.edu
• WebCorp Searches Google, http://www.webcorp.org.uk/
References
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Sinclair, J. (2004). Introduction. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (pp. 1-14). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Tribble, C., & Jones, G. (1997). Concordances in the classroom. A resource book for teachers (2nd ed.). Houston, TX: Athelstan.
Luciana Diniz is a PhD student in applied linguistics at Georgia State University. Her interests are corpus linguistics, metaphors, and CALL.
Katherine Moran is an MA student in applied linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University. She is interested in the uses of corpus linguistics for both pedagogical and research purposes.
On CALL March 2005 Volume 22 Number 2: Table of Contents
On CALL is published by TESOL and supported by your active membership. Contents copyright by authors except where otherwise noted.

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