What is Concordancing

This chapter contrasts the use of corpora and concordancing in the Web 1.0 era with the opportunities presented to the language teachers by the Web 2.0 stand-alone concordancing software, which make it much easier to access, compile, and consult the corpora that are more relevant for particular classroom contexts. It is argued here that once trained in the basic corpus consultation procedures with demo interfaces, teachers can exercise their autonomy by using texts available locally and globally to compile custom-made collections. In the chapter the two basic approaches to custom-made concordancing, namely the Web as Corpus and the compilation of ad-hoc collections will be described, together with a summary of sample tools. It is hoped that given careful selection of relevant sources, the learning process will become significantly enhanced thanks to more authentic and relevant language data, promoting teacher autonomy and discovery-based procedures.