The use of computerized concordances in second language teaching is discussed, drawing on the results of a study undertaken in a teaching seminar. In the study, a corpus of 401 English sentences from electronic mail (e-mail) texts written by American pupils to a German school were analyzed with an electronic concordancer and compared with 326 sentences from an English textbook commonly used in the schools. Analysis indicates that the e-mail texts: contained many verbs expressing liking and disliking, and infinitive constructions; contained many modifying constituents; and showed preferred use of "I am" instead of "I'm." It is concluded that the language of e-mail texts represents a variant that is part of the modern world but generally neglected in the foreign language classroom, and that use of concordances allows students to gain colloquial English, learn how to use it in social contexts, and learn in an explorative fashion, developing awareness of underlying structures and communicative functions. Contains eight references. (MSE)