Learner Autonomy through the Use of a Concordancer

The pedagogic value of electronic text analysis and retrieval systems in the fields of literary studies and language teaching is becoming more and more common with the availability of good easy-to-use software and sources of machine readable text. Once students are familiar with this tool, they may use it as readily as a dictionary to find examples of usage from their chosen corpus of text. Students' use of a concordancer involves more than looking up facts, a single consultation has a tendency to raise other questions, requiring further concordances. This leads to a kind of conjectural learning. Electronic text analysis offers the student the opportunity to take control of his/her own learning by means of purposeful interaction with text. The higher level skills of inferencing, connecting, interpreting and evaluating are brought into play and informal acquisition is facilitated in addition to selective attention to linguistic or literary features.