Concordancing and its Pedagogical Implications

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The purpose of this article is to introduce concordancing as an innovative educational technology with which language practitioners may reach some of their goals in their language studies and language teaching. Concordancing ,as defined by Tim Johns (1991),  is “researching the company that words keep ”.The aim of such kind of research is to investigate different aspects of a particular word like different meanings, grammatical contexts  in which it is used, and other words with which  it collocates.
Concordancing software is a tool that allows for the creation of discovery-based and exploratory learning materials. Its basic function is to extract lists with sample contexts of any word or structure being searched for. Such lists can then be used as a basis for what Tim Johns (1991) refers to as Data-Driven Learning (DDL).This article tries to elaborate on the issue.
One of the implications of concordancing is to provide dictionary compilers with large collections of texts drawn from both written and spoken language. These collections of texts can be the most reliable sources from which lexicographers can obtain their data for compiling a dictionary
As far as language teaching and language learning are concerned, Concordancing as a new method of Computer Assisted Language Learning(CALL) may solve a large number of practical problems particularly in the area of exploiting authentic resources. The present article gives some practical exercise examples through which language learners may learn a lot about any given word in the language. Word meanings, grammatical patterns in which a given word may appear, and word collocations are some pieces of information obtained from these kinds of exercises.

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