A concordancing program searches a group of texts called a corpus for
all examples of a particular search item.
A concordance displays frequency, phraseology, and collocation.
Frequency lists are useful for
identifying the most commonly occurring words and phrases in target texts,
such a result of and this suggests that in academic writing.
A further capability of concordance program is revealing collocations.
Thus, it may be useful for
you to know that utterly occurs before different, but not before similar.
Although, the immediate left collocates of an academic writing,
are mainly nouns and comprise a narrow range of terms,
form of, terms of, case of, effect of.
A concordancing program displays the result as lines of text across the screen,
with the search term highlighted in the middle.
Results can be sorted according to what is on the left or right of the search item.
And one, two, or three words away from the search term.
And this can provide data for your language learning.
If the corpus research is specific to your research field,
you can search in this way to improve your use of discipline specific English.
This is an example of what can be learned from a conca dowsen search
of a discipline specific corpus.
Look at the simple concordance program search results obtained by searching for
the term membrane.
Using this tool,
you can easily check out the usage of a particular word in even your writing.
Let us consider, for example, the word thickness, membrane thickness.
Does this word have a plural form?
Can I use the word thicknesses?
To find out, you can do a search of the discipline-specific corpus.
The updated result is this.
Some of these usages are different from those found in everyday English,
where thickness is almost always singular.
From this example, you can get an idea of how a single concordant surge
of a discipline-specific corpus can help you identify English usages
that are specific to that discipline.
Another issue that this tool can clarify
is how many different words can the word membrane be used?