My Concordancer: tailor-made software for language learners and teachers

Successful integration of corpus linguistics tools and methods into language classroom practices largely depends on three key factors: user training, relevant corpora and suitable corpus analysis software. It is this last aspect that the present paper focuses on. The concordancer plays a vital role in the process of corpus analysis as the interface between the human user and the electronic corpus. However, the majority of current concordancers have been developed for professional users. This paper argues that the requirements of the classroom are quite different and need to be addressed in the software design. In response to this, the paper concludes with a detailed description of My Concordancer, which offers itself as a tailor-made approach to classroom concordancing.