Friday, March 27, 2009

Post 5 - Concordance



Do you know what is concordance and how we can apply it in our language learning? Actually,before this,I've never heard of this word and don't even know its function..huhu...
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts and the original meaning of concordance is a word count of all different words in a text. The more recent meaning of concordance is a collection of examples of the use of a word.

How we can apply the function of the concordance in our language learning?
Concordance is very beneficial in language learning. For example,concordance can explain the word that we choose in different aspects and usages. Besides that,by using concordance,we can understand better on how to use the right word in various context. We also can use concordance as a tool to correct any grammar mistakes in our essays. Furthermore, it is also can improve and enhance our grammar and vocabulary as well.


With Concordance, we can:
  • make indexes and word lists
  • count word frequencies
  • compare different usages of a word
  • analyze keywords
  • find phrases and idioms
  • publish to the web
Concordance is also being used in:
  • Language teaching and learning
  • Data mining and data clean-up
  • Literary and linguistic scholarship
  • Translation and language engineering
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Natural language software development
  • Lexicography
  • Content analysis in many disciplines including accountancy, history, marketing, musicology, politics, geography, and media studies
The Use of concordance for language teachers and language learners:
  • The teacher can use a concordancer to find examples of authentic usage to demonstrate features of vocabulary, typical collocations, a point of grammar or even the structure of a text.

  • The teacher can generate exercises based on examples drawn from a variety of corpora, for example gap-filling exercises and tests.

  • Students can work out rules of grammar or usage and lexical features for themselves by searching for key words in context. Depending on their level, they can be invited to question some of the rules, based on their observation of patterns in authentic language.

  • Students can be more active in their vocabulary learning: depending on their level, they can be invited to discover new meanings, to observe habitual collocations, to relate words to syntax, or to be critical of dictionary entries.

  • Students can be invited to reflect on language use in general, based on their own explorations of a corpus of data, thus turning themselves into budding researchers.
















There are two articles about concordance that I've found.


Summary for the first article:

This study discusses the use of a web-based concordancing program using an interface design similar to the one used at the MICASE concordancing site to help students appropriately choose-reporting verbs. Concordancing technology can help the users to construct meanings and usage patterns based on sentences or pieces of discourse collected from published or transcribed texts. Besides that, concordancing programs not only provide a different role for grammar teachers but also different approach for learners. The goal of this project is to provide students with authentic materials that contained localized features specific to their academic fields. Moreover, the researcher also wanted to see whether the students could use the learning object to make choices about the uses of reporting verbs and to correct inappropriately used verbs. The results from the test of the students also indicated that mosst of the students could use the program effectively. As a conclusion, the use of concordancing program helps in teaching of grammar. Besides that,it also had given teachers,researchers and material developers the ability to integrate and develop the materials on teaching grammar.The writer also found that concordancing program can be a great value to the students.Despite the limitations in using concordancing program,the researcher hopes that this technology would help students to make an appropiate choice of reporting verbs.


Summary for the second article:

This is a research paper by TAGUCHI Kaya. In this paper he wants to propose the use of concordance for EFL learners to acquire the English article system. In his research,he compared the two ways of article error correction which are the use of a grammar book and the use of a concordance to see which one is more effective for EFL learners to acquire grammatical structures. The sampels of his research are 20 students majoring in economics at Japanese University and their native language is Japanese. During the first five weeks,the teacher corrects the students' essays by underlining incorrect use of articles. Then,students consult the Grammar Book to see their mistakes. During last five weeks,the students use a concordance to see the incorrect use of articles that underlined by their teacher. As a result,the students find out that by using concordance,they can save their time compared by using the Grammar Book to correct their mistakes. Besides that, by using a concordance,the students are sure that their incorrect use of articles are corrected correctly by the concordance.

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