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LangLit 
An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal
 
 
Vol. 1 Issue - 1
 
 
83
 
 
 
Aug, 2014 
such as prepositions and articles, among high-frequency words in the studied corpus are 
nouns, such as patients, risk, disease, health. They can be the focus of further analysis. For 
example, seeing the concordance for the keyword “patients” displayed in the way as shown 
in Figure 5, the students can list the adjectives and other parts of speech which collocate with 
this word. 
Fig. 5. Screenshot from a concordancer showing the concordance for the keyword “patients” 
Alternatively, the teacher can provide the students with the printed version of a 
concordance with the target word blanked out. The students’ task is to guess what word 
would fit all the slots in the displayed context. Using corpus-based concordances promotes 
discovery-based learning by encouraging the students to discover linguistic “facts” by 
themselves, which is in accordance with the principles of Data Driven Learning (Johns, 
1991). 
The majority of the above mentioned exercises are receptive, that is, the students 
make decisions about words but do not produce them. However, in some of them the students 
are asked to motivate their decisions, to give definitions or to use the chosen words in 
sentences of their own. In productive tasks the students are required to incorporate the newly 
studied words into writing or speaking activity, which include completion and creation of 
sentences and texts. Here are examples of instructions for written and spoken creative 
activities which are performed in our ESP classes: 
•
Use the words from the grid or list to make sentences of your own. 
•
Use the given words to write true sentences about yourself. 
•
Complete the doctor-patients interview with the doctor’s questions (the patient’s 
answers are given and the student who performs the part of the doctor must make the 

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