What is a concordancer?
We looked previously at using an online corpus like COCA to search for language patterns. You can also compile your own corpus for analysis using a concordancer. A concordancer is a program that allows you to add your own corpus of collected text files and then analyze them for language patterns. It is useful if you want to add a large sample of model texts for students to analyze and compare to their own writing. For one of my classes, I'm compiling various corpora for a group of Chinese professors so that they can compare their own academic writing to published research articles in their specific disciplines.
Getting started
1. Download Antconc (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/)
This is a free concordancing program that is easy to use.
2. Collect the texts that you want to analyze and save them as text files (.txt). Your corpus could contain 20 examples of model texts or thousands depending on your goals and teaching context.
3. Open the Antconc concordancer and then open the files you've collected for your corpus. From here you can start to analyze the text samples for language patterns.
I've attached a short instructional video below by AntConc's creator (Laurence Anthony) that will quickly guide you through the basics.
