Discussion of the Use of Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

Classroom concordance programs involve the analysis of concordances of language features. The use of concordancers can provide learners analytic skills to manipulate comprehensive databases for the sake of coping with real-language problems. Due to its practicability, the approach has been developed for language teaching in the ELT classroom. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of concordance programs in the EFL classroom. A great number of studies regarding the use of corpora and the concordancer as a resource in language teaching and learning demonstrate that concordancing as a teaching tool can be effectively used in classroom to meet some specific teaching purposes, and concordance analysis can help students discover and differentiate meanings of words and phrases, identify useful phrases and unfamiliar collocations, explore word order, and distinguish words with similar meanings. Consequently, in the EFL context, a series of concordance exercises can be carried out to assist students to investigate language data and derive patterns of language use. Furthermore, an active pedagogical approach should be oriented to the acquisition of valuable knowledge, to the solution to sophisticated problems and to the development of learning abilities. Based on this, teachers should select the right pedagogical approach to increase students’ motivation, promote their initiative, and guide them into the procedure of knowledge exploration.