Corpus, Concordancer, and Concordances  

By Asama Tasanameelarp 

Faculty of Liberal Arts and Management Sciences, Prince of Songkla university

 Within the last 10 years, there has been an increasing frequency of the use of corpora in language education, and a great number of corpus-based studies have become well-known in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching. Learners can use corpora to access authentic materials and self-discover language points. This learning approach is called Data-Driven Learning (DDL). In it, learners’ individually use the raw data which shows the frequency of words to observe a linguistic point of the language, such as word, phrase, meaning or grammatical rule. The knowledge received from the concordances is driven by the data contained in the corpora. To use this authentic information in ELT, the corpus, concordancer and concordances must be used together. The corpus is the database, the concordancer is the program for searching for words and phrases to be learnt, and the concordances are the lists of the particular words and phrases in the context.

A corpus (corpora for plural), is a collection of real language use. Corpora can be based on simple and brief texts on a narrow topic or can run into the millions of words. Users can access corpora via the Internet or with software.

The program which offers the searching and analyzing of corpora is called a concordancer, and the output it provides is the concordances themselves. Users enter a target word or phrase to get information on how it is used in speech and writing. Occurrences of the target word or phrase in speech and writing are then displayed on the computer screen. The concordances can be viewed in several formats, the most popular being the Keyword in Context (KWIC) format. In this format, the keyword of the word search occurs in context in the middle of the concordance lines.

The Lextutor Concordancer: Online concordance           Concordance for home with associated word go