6th posting-The Concordance applications.

This is our final posting, it is a pair work, and again my partner for this posting is Maeriya. We are requested to post about “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad page 70 in OTL book and also search in the internet for articles or publications on the applications of concordance and according same topics that given to us. The topic that we chose is applications of concordance in language teaching and learning.

Introduction.

"literally agreement, harmony, hence derivatively a citation of parallel passages, and specifically an alphabetic arrangement of the words contained in a book with citations of the passages in which they occur." - Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 ed.

A concordance's function is basically to bring together, in other words, to 'concord' passages of text which show the use of a word. It is a type of index arrangement, working in a similar way to the verbal index found at the back of textbooks, in other words, it searches for instances of a word or phrase and comes up with each case of it. Whereas an index in the back of a book will show words in alphabetical order but only refer to them, the concordance will show each instance of each word together in the context from which it came.

Did you know?
Hugo de Saint Charo (d.1262), who employed 500 monks to assist him, compiled the first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible. In 1448, Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years. Conrad Kircher did a couple of years later 1599 saw a concordance to the Greek New Testament published by Henry Stephens and the Septuagint in 1602. Mr Marbeck published the first concordance to the English bible in 1550, according to Cruden it did not employ the verse numbers devised by Robert Stephens in 1545 but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did. Then followed the notorious Cruden's Concordance and Strong's Concordance.

Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics that can be used for the study of a text, such as:

• comparing different usages of the same word
• analysing keywords
• analysing word frequencies
• finding and analysing phrases and idioms
• finding translations of subsentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories
• creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)

These are the articles regarding to the concordance applications that we found in the Internet.

Using Corpora In Language Teaching And Learning.

by James Thomas

Masaryk University,

Brno, Czech Republic

Starting with Language

To account for language phenomena, we need to examine a large sample of genuine, or attested, language not invented “possible” sentences. John Sinclair (1991: 6) effectively pruned the argument in favour of invented sentences when he wrote: "One does not study all of botany by making artificial flowers." Regardless, there are not enough artificial sentences to draw meaningful conclusions from and furthermore, they are created purely on the basis of intuition, to which he optimistically commented, "the stranglehold of intuition is being relaxed" (ibid. p.6).

As is well-known, the large samples of attested language come in the form of language corpora. These now exist for many languages and sub-languages, such as corpora of academic language, legal, medical, tourist and computer language. Using a concordancer, the type of program that searches corpora and presents the findings, the existence of unknown knowns can manifest and the constraints on particular language choices can be observed. From such data comes information which, given the necessary conditions, can become knowledge. You can see more about the article in:

http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_soft23.htm

Teaching Preposition Using A Concordancer.

Nuraihan Mat Daud
Naser Amm Kamel Abusa'
English Language & Literature Dept.
International Islamic University, Malaysia.

Prepositions are one of the most used parts of speech in English. In many cases, it is not always easy to work out which preposition is the most appropriate for every particular context. Many second language learners have difficulties with prepositions as they are one of the most problematic areas (Lindstromberg, 1991 and Capel, 1993). The difficulties faced by learners in understanding how prepositions are used in sentence construction highlights the need for an effective teaching method. One way of overcoming this problem is by using a computer concordancer in teaching.

A concordancer is a computer program, which is used to find the occurrences of every single word or phrase in a text. Sinclair (1991a) claims that a concordance is the nucleus of corpus linguistics because it reveals many facts about the language and its patterns show how a language system works when it is analyzed. A corpus is defined as, "a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language" (Sinclair, 1991a: 171).

The use of a concordancer in language teaching is not new. Skehan (1981) was one of the first researchers to discuss what a concordancer can offer a teacher. Honey field (1989) provides a typology of exercises that can assist teachers in their language classrooms. Tribble and Jones (1990), in fact, argue that the applications of concordance output are much too diverse to list exhaustively. See more in;

http://www.melta.org.my/ET/1999/main6.htm

Here is the examples for the concordance applications in teaching and learning site;

For the Teacher

As a linguistic informant

One important application is to use the concordance as a resource tool to inform teacher appreciation of linguistic usage. A study of the syntactic patterns of the concordance lines would indicate how many connectors are typically not used in sentence or clause but commonly occur following the subject. Take example, suppose this time a teaching wanted to refresh his/her memory on the use of For and since. Concordances of the two words would quickly reveal that for typically followed by a period (for three years, etc.) while since is followed by a point in time (since 1987, etc.)

As a source of input for teaching.

In using the concordance 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. Thus, for example, when teaching the contrasting uses of the present progressive and the present perfect tenses, instead of teachers trusting to their intuitions and making up examples to illustrate contrasting uses, these can be derived from a concordance. Similarly, in presenting new vocabulary, concordance can provide examples of authentic contextualized language. For example, if a student is having difficulty with distinctions of meaning involving the modals can and could, then the teacher can call up instances of usage of these two modal forms and by means of the examples conduct an analysis of the differences.

As Input for Materials Development

One potential problem with using concordance directly as described above is that not all of the examples might be appropriate for teaching purposes. This is where an advantage to be had in preparing concordance-based teaching materials in advance. For examples, inappropriate examples can be deleted or all of the examples illustrating one particular usage of a word can be grouped together. This sort of editing can be easily be done by converting the concordance file into a word processing format.

For the Learner.

Error Analysis.

A guided use of the concordance by the learner is in error analysis and correction. In this activity, the teacher indicates errors in student writing which can be investigated and corrected with the help of the concordance. This is a good activity to begin concordancing with, as it gives learners specific language items to investigate, but at the same time allows them to work out how their use of language differs from that of the concordanced material.

Serendipity Learning.

The easiest, most obvious and most autonomous learner application of concordancing is to allow learners to use the concordance as and when they wish for whatever purposes they wish, This type of usage has been referred to as ‘‘serendipity learning’’ (Johns, 1988). Learner decides to look at some examples of the present progressive. This newly acquired awareness perhaps leads the learner to look up these other uses in a grammar book or to ask the teacher about them. Example of serendipity learning, here a student starts by browsing down word frequency list, which most concordancers provide this be rather like browsing the pages of dictionary. The student notices that the word experience, which had been learned as a non-count noun and occurs in the plural as well as in the singular form.

Inductive learning.

One issue in the use of concordance-based materials, that of the application of inductive or deductive reasoning. Concordance material can be used in both ways. If teacher explains that he/she teaching the contrast between the present continuous and the present perfect tense, explains the difference in meaning, and presents concordances to illustrate both, this is a deductive approach.