Posting 5 - Concordance

Concordance - is a list of words in a piece of text or a collection of texts (usually referred to as a corpus).

Concordancer – a tool or a program (software) that helps to list the words in context.

Use of Concordance

• Make indexes and word lists

Count word frequencies

• Compare different usages of a word

• Analyze keywords

• Find phrases and idioms

• Publish to the web

Applications

• Language teaching and learning

• Data mining and data clean-up

• Literary work and linguistic

• Translation

• Corpus linguistics

• Content analysis

Summary of Article 1:

Concordancing in Language Learning

By John Flowerdew

This article focuses on the applications of concordance in language learning and shows us how this concordance works. Generally, concordancing use searches for function [grammatical] words as a way of helping learners discover grammatical rules, and searching for pairs of near synomyms in order to give learners some of the evidence needed for distinguishing their use.

Usually, concordance used to derive grammatical rules. A concordance will reveal a variety of meanings and patterns attaching to this function word. Examples are given to show the different semantic uses and syntactic patterns based on a word in the context. It also shows the use of pairs of near synonyms in a corpus of biology lectures and readings, concordances of which were used for teaching and learning activities in a content-based language program.

For teachers, one important application of concordancing is to use the concordancer as a resource tool to inform teachers’ appreciation of linguistic usage, that is, as a Linguistic Informant. Secondly, teachers use the concordancer as a source of input for teaching, as opposed to simply as an informant on usage, teachers can generate authentic instances of usage to present to students when teaching a particular language point. Lastly, concordance used as input for materials development for teachers.

On the other hand, learners use it in error analysis and correction. The teacher indicates errors in student writing which can be investigated and corrected by means of the concordancer. For learners, concordancing is a serendipity Learning, which is similar in a way to browsing in a dictionary. Another issue in the use ofconcordance-based materials is that of the application of inductive or deductive reasoning.

Link to article: http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:dGPVpVtJKFMJ:sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/10/1000064.pdf+applications+of+concordance+in+language+learning

Summary of Article 2:

How to use concordances in teaching English

This article introduces some suggestions on how to use concordances in teaching English. The uses of concordancers in teaching and learning can be divided into 'low contact' to 'high contact'. 'Low contact' refers to concordances being used as a reference tool by a teacher, much as an individual may use a dictionary. 'High contact' use in which concordances are used as one of the main language resources in a class.

Concordances are really useful in teaching. First of all, it provides students with a large amount of example sentences or example sentences with gaps to let students use their grammatical and lexical knowledge to fill the gaps. Besides, students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage. Furthermore, trough concordance, students can discover for themselves what rules can be deduced from the evidence. The software of concordance can be used as a computer quiz for students. Lastly, with the software called 'Concordance', it is possible to create 'web concordances'

http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/usingconcs.html

My Points of View:

In my opinion, concordance benefits both the language learners and language teachers. First, leaners use it in error analysis and correction. Leaners can also compae the different usages of the same word since the concordance will search for pairs of near synomyms. With that, it contribute to language learning also. Besides, it will do the translation as well. It also counts the word frequency. So, I think Concordancing is a good way to train learners to pay attention to patterns of usage in their everyday reading.

For language teacher, concordancers are used to prepare printed worksheets for their students. In other words, teachers use the concordancer as a source of input for teaching. A teacher favouring an inductive approach to learning could present the concordances as examples of a language structure already taught. This will defitely interest students. They get many teaching ideas from concordancer that can be used in language teaching for their students. For example, example sentences or example sentences with gaps, group a single word according to usage, find the rule, as a computer quiz and as a web concordance.

As a conclusion, the use of concordance should be introduced to language learners or students and as well as all the teachers.