ESL Teaching & Learning Resources
Concordancing & Collocations

Concordancers (software to create concordances)

JWT (JustTheWord) <www.jtw.com> -- a site for collocations, concordancing, and synonyms (thesaurus); excellent resource for writing, to check likely and unlikely collocations; provided by Sharp Laboratories of Europe; based on the British National Corpus (BNC)

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) <www.americancorpus.org> -- by Mark Davies; 400+ million words; recent update: 410 million words of text, including texts through July 2010; frequency lists of English expanded to include the top 60,000 lemmas (headwords);  download a spreadsheet with the frequency of each word in each of the five main genres (spoken, fiction, popular magazine, newspaper, and academic) as well as more than 40 sub-genres (Fiction: Movies, Magazines:  Sports, Academic: Medicine, etc); download the top 200-300 collocates (nearby words) for each lemma (4.8 million collocates total), as well as more than 155,000,000 n-grams (the frequency of all three-word strings in the corpus). More information is available at: http://www.wordfrequency.info; new online: Corpus of Historical American English (COCA)--400+ million words from the 1810s-2000s; look at changes  in words, phrases, grammar, and meaning during the last 200 years of English – with a level of detail that is not possible anywhere else. The corpus has been funded by a generous grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is now online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha.

Online Concordancers <http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/>  -- by Tom Cobb and Chris Greaves

• Corpus-based Concordances, including Multi-Concordance (several words, word families, multi-word units)
• Text-based Concordances: Transform any text (up to c. 4000 words) or small corpus (up to 50,000 words) into a complete
  concordance index for every word, interactive left-right collocate sort options.
• Story Concordancers (Every word in a full length story is click-linked to concordances from rest of the story + other works by author)
• Related (Lextutor) concordances: Range and Phrase Extractor

See Vance Stevens' summary page on Concordancing and Text Analysis <http://www.vancestevens.com/textanal.htm> for links to concordancers and articles.

See Free Concordancers <http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html> -- link to aConCorde no longer works, but the others do.

Textworld.com <http://www.textworld.com/> -- This site contains software and information relating to natural language text. You can download some free programs for use in literary and linguistic computing. These allow you to create your own word lists (vocabulary tables), produce concordances, and to search for collocations; includes 3 concordancers.

WordSmith Tools <http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/> - Lexical analysis software for data-driven learning and research

Athelstan Online <http://www.athel.com/mono.html> -- a collection of Concordancers and corpora

Concordance 3.3 (PC, free), R.J.C. Watt

Concordance, J.-D. Fekete (PC/MAC, free)

Conc (MAC), SIL International Software

MonoConc Pro (PC), Athelstan

Concordances

JWT (JustTheWord) <www.jtw.com> -- a site for collocations, concordancing, synonyms (thesaurus), and grammar; excellent resource for writing, to check likely and unlikely collocations; provided by Sharp Laboratories of Europe; based on the British National Corpus (BNC)

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) <www.americancorpus.org> -- by Mark Davies; use this to see how the word or phrase is used in context (with which other words --lexical collocation -- and with what kinds of grammatical structures -- grammatical collocation).  See these YouTube videos on uses of COCA:

• Introduction to Collocations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dss_hlqmMGM&feature=related (3:11 min)
• How to use COCA's display options: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Uz2CyfOXc&feature=related (6:24 min) (EXCELLENT for comparing the use of words)
• Parts of Speech Searches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5a_XuCVH70&feature=related (3:58 min) (EXCELLENT demo with prepositions and adverbs collocated with "communicate")
• How to find and use COCA'S Concordance feature: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CiXB1rvIQ (6:42 mins)
• Advanced Collocate Searches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ikCzl6SJk&feature=related (9:36 min)

The Compleat Lexical Tutor <http://www.lextutor.ca/> -- by Tom Cobb, with built-in downloadable text-to-speech software and hypertext builder to build resource-linked texts for intensive reading (Turn your own texts into hypertexts! Click here.); to get started, use the Quick Lookup box (upper right) to see a concordance of how the word/phrase is used in a collection of online corpora; good for advanced writing and vocabulary (to see examples of lexical and grammatical collocations)

British National Corpus <http://thetis.bl.uk/lookup.html> -- an online simple search of the BNC -- a 100-million corpus of current written and spoken British English from many different sources.

Collins WordbanksOnline English <http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx>   -- a sample of The Collins WordbanksOnline English corpus, which is composed of 56 million words of contemporary written and spoken text; use the query syntax to specify word combinations, wildcards, part-of-speech tags, and so on.

Web Concordancer (by the Virtual Language Center of Hong Kong) < http://www.edict.com.hk/concordance/default.htm> -- The VLC Web Concordancer is the easiest to use concordancing program - simply type in a word or phrase to search for, select a corpus (file of texts) and hit <Enter> or press the search button to start the search. You can select any of the corpus files to search from the selection list. You can also get concordance examples of words you look up in the Net Dictionary as in the example below.  Find examples of uses at http://www.edict.com.hk/StudyGuide/concorda.htm.

Simple Concordance Program <http://web.bham.ac.uk/A.Reed/scp/> -- free concordancer by Textworld.com

Articles and activities for concordancing

Concordancing with Language Learners:   Why? When? What? <http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/stevens.html>  -- (V. Stevens)   CAELL Journal, Summer 1995

Using concordance programs in the modern foreign languages classroom, ICT4LT Module 2.4.  Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers.  http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm.  (updated May 4, 2007; maintained by Graham Davies)

Tutorial: Concordances and Corpora, by Catherine N. Ball (1996), http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/corpora/tutorial.html

Emerging Technologies: Tools and Trends in Corpora Use for Teaching and Learning, by Bob Godwin-Jones (2001, Sept.).  Language Learning & Technology 5 (3). http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num3/emerging/

Concordancing for English Language Teachers, by Garry Dyck (1999).  http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~gdyck/conc.html

Windows Media File presentation: "Resource-assisted learning: using computers to study language" by Chris Greaves

Full paper: "Resource-assisted learning: a vocabulary on-demand model for online learning" by Chris Greaves

"Can the rate of lexical acquisition from reading be increased? An experiment in reading French with a suite of on-line resources." by Tom Cobb, Chris Greaves & Marlise Horst

English Language Institute Technology Tip of the Month--Concordancing Activity: Connecting clauses    

Studying grammar with the aid of the concordancer

Using a Concordancer in Literary Studies by Maria Rosario Caballero Rodriguez published in The European English Messenger Vol VII/2 pp 59-62, Autumn 1999

Sensing the Winds of Change: An Introduction to Data-Driven Learning  <http://www.nuis.ac.jp/~hadley/publication/windofchange/windsofchange.htm> -- by Gregory Hadley

ICAME Journal <http://www.hd.uib.no/icame/ij22/> -- suggests that electronic newspapers can provide a way to create corpus.