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This pilot study set out to determine whether a parallel corpus and a concordancer would be appropriate tools to supplement a teaching programme of German at the beginners' level in an unsupervised environment.In this instance, a beginner student of German was asked to find satisfactory answers to unknown vocabulary and formulate appropriate grammar rules for himself using the parallel corpus and concordancer as the only tools.It is shown that these tools can be of great benefit for beginners. AIMS AND OBJECTIVESI describe a pilot study involving a beginner student of German who undertook a supplementary unsupervised programme of learning German using a concordancer and a parallel corpus.I investigate how a beginner student of German fares using a concordancer, Multiconcord (see King St.John see also Johns, 1986Johns, , p. 151, 1991a, p. 2), p. 2).This therefore assists the student in exploring the language in great detail and thereby gaining further insights into its grammar and vocabulary.The use of concordancing in language teaching is not new.However, this pilot study demonstrates for the first time the potential of concordancing in learning German at the beginner's level. CONCORDANCER AND CORPORA IN LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENTSConcordancing is a tool that has been used extensively by linguistic and literary researchers.A concordance is a list of the occurrences of either a particular word, or a part of a word or a combination of words in context and it is drawn from a text corpus, which is presented in context.A corpus is a large body of text often in electronic format.(see Baker 1995, p. 226; Francis, 1993, p. 138; Johansson, 1995, p. 19; Leech, 1991, p. 8 for more detailed definitions) Linguistic and applied linguistic researchers are not the only group who can benefit from the use of concordancing as a tool for language learning (i.e., as a means of exploring the meanings and uses of Elke St.
Elke St. John (Sat,) studied this question.