Corpora and Concordancers
Corpora have been used for many years as the basis of linguistic research and also for the compilation of dictionaries and reference works such as the Collins Cobuild series, published by HarperCollins. Tribble & Barlow (2001), Sinclair (2004) and McEnery & Wilson (2011) describe a variety of ways in which corpora can be used in language teaching.
An early reference to the use of electronic concordancers in language teaching can be found in Higgins & Johns (1984: pp. 88–94), and many examples of their practical use in the classroom are described by Lamy & Klarskov Mortensen (2010).
It was Tim Johns (1991), however, who raised the profile of the use of concordancers in the language classroom with his concept of Data-driven learning (DDL). DDL encourages learners to work out their own rules about the meaning of words and their usage by using a concordancer to locate examples in a corpus of authentic texts. It is also possible for the teacher to use a concordancer to find examples of authentic usage to demonstrate a point of grammar or typical collocations, and to generate exercises based on the examples found. Various types of concordancers and where they can be obtained are described by Lamy & Klarskov Mortensen (2011).
Robb (2003) shows how it is possible to use Google as a concordancer, but he also points out a number of drawbacks, for instance there is no control over the educational level, nationality, or other characteristics of the creators of the texts that are found, and the presentation of the examples is not as easy to read as the output of a dedicated concordancer that places the key words (i.e. the search terms) in context.
Read more about this topic: Computer-assisted Language Learning