Corpus Literacy for Advanced Web Concordancers

This chapter features two widely used tools: the Compleat Lexical Tutor (Lextutor) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Unlike the more intuitive tools in the previous chapter (SKELL, CorpusMate, VersaText, and Netspeak), Lextutor and COCA are more suited for users with prior experience to leverage a broader range of functionalities. As such, these two advanced web concordancers require a deeper understanding of corpus search techniques and interface logic to navigate effectively, although they can provide users with highly specific and targeted query and output options. This chapter guides readers through their core functionalities, such as collocation comparison, frequency searches, and KWIC views, while offering practical exercises to support personal and pedagogical applications. Occasionally, these will be accompanied with tips for teachers suggesting how certain corpus search functions are best suited for certain teaching activities. These chapters guide readers from basic to advanced corpus tools, preparing them to integrate these resources into diverse classroom contexts. This foundation will set the stage for further pedagogical applications explored in later chapters.