Concordance Lines

Students examine multiple corpus examples of a word in context to discover patterns inductively.

Procedure

1. Select a target word or structure.
2. Extract 10-15 concordance lines from a corpus (e.g., COCA, BNC) showing the word in context.
3. Students examine the lines: "What words appear before/after? What patterns do you notice?"
4. Students formulate rules about meaning, grammar, or collocation.
5. Verify findings with a dictionary or grammar reference.

Tips

• Use tools like SkELL (free) for easy concordance extraction.
• Highlight the target word in each line for quick scanning.
• Start with concrete, high-frequency words before abstract ones.