The use of concordances in the clasroom

Abstract

Corpus-based studies have been in vogue for the past two decades. Linguists have investigated the language by searching corpora, large banks of machine-readable text, to confirm or refute their hypotheses. It is apparent corpus linguistics has established a firm position in academic circles. Now the question arises whether corpus search can prove to be applicable in the classroom, especially as most scholars are not in accord on this issue. This work will outline some of the reasons why to exploit a corpus in the classroom. Furthermore, it will give an account of how to use the corpus with students and will present self-designed classroom activities. Last but not least, it will assess feedback and the application of corpus search from the students' and teacher's point of view.