MET workshop

Masterclass on AntConc: advanced concordancing and other language analysis techniques

Developer and facilitator: Prof. Laurence Anthony

In this workshop I will first introduce various corpus-based methods that can help language consultants understand, edit and translate discipline-specific language at the micro and macro level. In particular, I will focus on the use of concordances, dispersion plots, clusters, n-grams, collocations, word frequencies and keyword measures, all of which are available in the freeware, multiplatform corpus analysis toolkit called AntConc. For each analytical method I will introduce a real-world language question or problem and show how AntConc can be used to find a practical answer or solution. Next, I will introduce a series of support tools that can work in tandem with AntConc, allowing language consultants to quickly and easily construct personalized corpora for later use. Finally, I will discuss the need for more advanced corpus tools and suggest ways in which language consultants may contribute to their development.

As this is a hands-on workshop, participants should bring their laptops.

Laurence Anthony is Professor of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Japan. He has a BSc degree (Mathematical Physics) from the University of Manchester, UK, and MA (TESL/TEFL) and PhD (Applied Linguistics) degrees from the University of Birmingham, UK. He is a former Director and current Technical English Program Coordinator at the Center for English Language Education (CELESE), Waseda University, and was a founding member of the IEEE Professional Communication Society Japan Chapter. For 25 years, he has worked extensively in the area of technical writing, editing and translation, offering training seminars to some of Japan's biggest international companies. In the area of corpus linguistics, he has developed a wide range of freeware, multiplatform analytical tools, including AntConc, AntWordProfiler, EncodeAnt and TagAnt. In 2012, he received the National Prize of the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies (JAECS) for his work in this area.