AntConc: design and development of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for the technical writing classroom

In this paper, the author describes AntConc, a freeware, multi-platform, multi-purpose corpus analysis toolkit, designed by the author for specific use in the classroom. AntConc includes a powerful concor dancer, word and keyword frequency generators, tools for cluster and lexical bundle analysis, and a word distribution plot. It also offers the choice of simple wildcard searches or powerful regular expression searches, and has an extremely easy-to-use, intuitive interface. After explaining the background to AntConc, the author gives an overview of each of its tools, and explains the value to learners. Then, the author discusses the current limitations of the software, before explaining how these will be addressed in the future.