5th posting :part 2

APPLICATION OF CONCORDANCE IN LANGUAGE LEARNING:
Concordancing has a variety of applications. One of the earliest of these was in the field of lexicography and dictionary making. This work has resulted in the Collins Cobuild dictionary, in which the entries make use of authentic concordanced examples. Concordancing has also been used in the field of stylistics and literary research, as well as in purely linguistic research. Typically, these applications depend upon large corpora of text which in many cases run to millions of words. To date much of what has been written about concordancing in language teaching has been programmatic or has described experimental applications which have not been widely replicated. However, there are signs that concordancing has reached the stage where it is about to have a
significant impact on the organization and practice of language teaching. This development is likely to come about for three main reasons:
1. The experimental studies are building up aliterature indicating the ways in which concordancing
can be used in teaching and curriculum development.
2. The software has become much more “user friendly” and is now capable of handling large
amounts of text very quickly and easily, whereas in the past large amounts of data could only
be handled by software which was slow and difficult to use.
3. The large publishers, such as Oxford University Press, Longman and Cambridge University