ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how students can undertake computer-based stylistic analysis of texts with relatively limited resources. The Computer-Aided Text Analysis (CATA) module requires students to assemble a mini-corpus of texts, investigate aspects of the language of the texts by using appropriate software on a PC, and to write up their investigation as a project report. This chapter outlines the stages that students go through in undertaking their CATA project: assembling the corpus, learning the software, formulating questions and obtaining results, drawing conclusions and writing-up. Once the choice of texts has been decided, the corpus needs to be assembled in electronic form. Students are taught how to use three pieces of software: PC-Litstats, Longman Mini-Concordancer and TACT. MonoConc for Windows has been used as the concordance programme. A corpus usually consists of a minimum of two texts or text extracts, since the basic approach is normally comparative.
