ANTCONC SOFTWARE Sydney McNeill 

"AntConc is a freeware, multi-platform,

multi-purpose corpus analysis toolkit,
designed specifically for use in the
classroom"(Anthony, 2004, p. 7).

WHAT IS
This is a software developed specifically
for teachers and learners to use. ANTCONC
?
Its tools include: concordancer, word and
key word frequency generator, tools for
cluster and lexical bundle analysis, and a
word distribution plot. 
WORD LIST TOOL
•This is the first tool you will use after you have uploaded your texts
into the software. 
•Allows you to see how many total words are in the corpus.
•Lists out every single word that is in the corpus as well as the number
of occurrences of these words
CONCORDANCE TOOL
•Arguably the most important tool in this software (or in any corpus
software).
•This tool allows you to search a particular word or string of words
and see how they are used in context. 
CONCORDANCE PLOT TOOL 
•Allows you to see the exact location of a word in a particular text (ie. Is the word
more commonly used in the beginning of the text when compared to the end of the
text). 
•It also shows you the distribution of the word across the text as a whole. 
CLUSTER AND N-GRAMS TOOL
•Allows you to look at lexical bundles, such as phrasal verbs. 
•Orders what you search either by frequency of occurrences or alphabetically. 
•"Research has shown that collocations and other multi-word units such as phrasal
verbs, and idioms are particularly difficult for learners to acquire (Nesselhauf &
Tschichold, 2002)." (As cited in Anthony, 2004, p. 11). 
BENEFITS OF USING ANTCONC
FOR TEACHING WRITING AT UA
•It allows teachers and learners to customize the corpus for
their own purposes, and its customizability makes it suitable for a
genre-based approach to teaching writing, which we use in FYW. 
•With a tool like Wavelength that the University offers, its relatively easy
to download these essays as txt files and upload them into the software. 
•It allows students to pay attention to sentence level and
lexical features in a way that they might not otherwise. 
•The search tools in this particular software are more geared towards
classroom use than other corpus software on the market, which is often
geared towards research (such as WordSmith Tools and Web
Concordancer). 
REFERENCES
Anthony, L. (2004). AntConc: A learner and classroom friendly, multi-platform
corpus
analysis toolkit. IWLeL 2004: An Interactive Workshop on Language e-Learning, pp.
7-13. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/iwlel_2004_anthony_antconc.pdf