Utilizing the Concordancer

I also feel that training to use and utilize concordances might be burdensome for some low-level English language learners. If the language learner is at the lower level stage then the concordances may be overwhelming, however if the LLer is in advanced stages in learning then they have an great ability to benefit from concordances. I agree that through concordancers students are able to get a wide view on how lexical/grammar is used in meaningful context. "The call for teaching grammar in discourse contexts has its roots in functional grammar and is founded largely on the belief that grammar deals not only with forms but also with semantics and pragmatics" (Liu, Jiang, 2009, p.62). There are a wide variety of concordance softwares, therefore I noticed that some are more easier to use, while others have more corpus data than others. Students are able to use Wild Cards (if you are using AntConc) to check multiple or single words and phrases, words that are associated with the main word, and/or words etc. In regards to COCA, there is a ? next to Word (s), COLLOCATES, POS LIST etc. that, when clicked, gives you a step-by-step example on how to get concordance results and this is also available under the SECTION and DISPLAY sections. There are multiple displays, such as Lists, Charts, KWIC,and COMPARE to view your display and choose your context, whether it be in Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper etc areas. Overall when training students in using COCA concordancer basically the training may be time consuming but once the student gets a feel of the software they will be able to utilize it during their LLing experience. 

In learning collocations, I would say that the inductive approach is more beneficial, since students are observing the concordance data to find a pattern in grammar and vocabulary usages thus deducing a relative rule concerning grammar/lexical usage. While, in deductive approach, a student will, "use corpora either to test the rules and patterns they have learned or to classify concordance data by applying the rules and patterns" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p. 62). In teaching Lexico-grammar, I would say that the inductive approach is beneficial for students since through conducting analysis of the concordance data, LLers are able to retain the lexico-grammatical patterns and usages and "conducting concordance analysis of recurrent collocational and colligational patterns leads to acquisition of more useful general grammatical rules" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p. 62). In addition, the analysis of corpus data allows LLers to view lexical usages in context forms.

The limited size of corpus data is, in my opinion, temporary. When corpus data is used more readily in LLing environments, the increasing popularity will ultimately increase the context data incorporated in the software. I think that in EFL classes will benefit from corpus data learning in greater magnitude, since they are able to "instantly explain difficult lexicogrammatical issues" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p.69). But incorporating corpus based data learning in the classrooms, EFL teachers or ESL teachers are able to explain difficult lexical/grammatical usages and provide concordance results as examples. With the increasing usage of concordances, there will ultimately be an increase in corpus data results.