Abstract:

Foreign language teaching involves the active use in the educational process of computer programmes, synchronous and asynchronous means of Internet communication, web technologies (work with sites, web logs, etc.), use of search engines.

In recent decades, with the development of information technology, there have appeared computer programmes which perform the same work in a matter of minutes.Electronic concordances consist of a huge database of texts, including excerpts from national and regional newspapers, specialized magazines on various topics for all ages, scientific literature and fiction, letters, office memorandums, student essays, as well as recordings of conversations made by volunteers of different ages and backgrounds, business and government talks and radio programmes, and programmes which enable people to analyze this database. These electronic concordances are widely used in the creation of dictionaries and thesauri.

In addition, the type of information and computer technology under consideration offers great opportunities for teachers of foreign languages. Using computer concordances, one can get a list of sentences in which a certain word is used (up to 90 words before and after it). These concordances are represented by Real Academia Espanola on the websites (corpus.rae.es, corpusdelespanol.or).

Concordance allows finding original examples of the use of words, expressions, grammatical structures, text structures as well as creating exercises based on them.

Concordance can also be used for various types of work:
- to work with synonyms which require actualization in different contexts;
- to analyze the traditions of the syntactic compatibility of a linguistic unit;
- to analyze the patterns of the use of a certain morphological form of a word;
- to analyze the problem of "false friends" (using parallel concordances), including the use of examples to compare the number of lexical units in different languages.

The essence of this concept is that students use concordance to analyze the original cases of using the language in oral and written speech, which allows them to take a more active position in the study of a foreign language, to derive the rules themselves. Thus, it is authentic material which becomes the basis of learning.

Keywords:

Concordance, oral and written speech, foreign language teaching, synchronous, asynchronous.