Different methods of learning

WORD CONCORDANCE IN A TEXT
A concordance is a listing of each occurrence of a word (or pattern) in a text or corpus, presented with the words surrounding it. A simple concordance of "Key Word In Context" (KWIC) is what is usually referred to when people talk about concordances in corpus linguistics, and an example is shown in figure 3. Concordances are essentially a method of data visualisation. The search term and its co-text are arranged so that the textual environment can be assessed and patterns surrounding the search term can be identified visually. Michael Barlow (2004) defines concordances (and wordlists) as transformations of a text, giving the analyst the opportunity to view different perspectives on a text.
Often a concordance of a particular search term in a corpus will produce too many results for a linguist to read and analyse. In this case a reduced number of examples can be selected. Often around 40 examples (or a number providing up to two screenfuls in the working environment) is useful for providing the analyst with at least a preliminary view of the relevant patterns, although the number necessary to examine is heavily dependent on the structure of the corpus, the total number of examples and the type of investigation which is being carried out. If such a sample is chosen, it is usually important to select them either randomly from the total, or to select every nth example (e.g. every 20th example if there are around 8000 in total). Otherwise, the software is likely to provide by default the first 40 examples, which may all come from one file, and thus there would be a high risk of a highly biased sample, reflecting only the language usage of one text or variety. Selecting every nth examples is one method of thinning a concordance (see section 8 below).
Analysis with this function 
The primary motivation for the use of concordance data in modern corpus linguistics is the belief that interesting insights into the structure and usage of a language can be obtained by looking at words in real texts and seeing what patterns of lexis, grammar and meaning surround them.