Both Michael and Sue (and others) have asked that we make it clear to the user, what search they have specified, when they use the 'left context' and 'right context' boxes. The relation between words entered textually and POSes selected from the menu is a particularly problem.
Michael says:
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In the concordance entry screen, in the Context area, people sometimes make the assumption that the boxes for Lemma and PoS are linked: in other words, they think that if they put a word (say 'ABOUT') in one of the two Lemma boxes, then they must also specify 'preposition' in the PoS box below. (Actually if you do this, it doesn't affect the outcome.). What they generally don't realise is that the main function of the PoS box is to specify 'any preposition', 'any noun' etc. and that this box can be used independently of the Lemma box, which can be left blank.
It's explained on p4 of the documentation, but is there any way of making this more transparent, e.g. a note on the screen saying you can specify a specific word and/or a whole word class.
Having said all the above, I should also say that the 35 people on the Irish course were all bowled over by the software, and also seemed to become fairly confident users in a very short time.
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Sue noted similar problems (and also felt the and/or/not box wasn't obviosu enough. I thought a possible solution would be to show what the left-context-constraints and right-context-constraints are, in a box - but I'm not sure. Maybe, when people click, eg, 'noun', from the list, we can add <ANY NOUN> in a 'current search' box, with AND OR NOT connectives also showing.
