Posting 5- CONCORDANCE

Concordance- Listing of Kewords in Contexts (KWIC),the list of words appear with their
immediate contexts.
Concordancer- A tool or a program (software) that helps to list the words in contexts.
Concordancing- The act of doing the concordance.

A concordancer is a computer program which is used to find the occurrences of every single word or phrase in a text. 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.

What is it used for?
*Creating indexes and word list
*Analyzing word frequencies
*Comparing different usages of the same word
*Analyzing keywords
*Find phrase and idioms
*Publish to web

Language Learning

For learner in language learning they can use concordance as an 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. Besides that concordance also act as 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.

Language Teachers

Concordance is also important to language teachers 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. For 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…) while since is followed by a point in time (since 1987…) Another benefit fot teacher is that concordance plays an important role as a source of input for teaching. In using the concordance as a source of input for teaching, 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, 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. Besides that, concordance is also important as input for Materials Development. It means that, 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.

Therefore, the presence of the concordancer made it possible for the teacher to provide authentic examples of a certain language structure with speed. The teacher, in this approach, acted as a facilitator rather than as a know-all. The mistakes made by the students can help the teacher to focus on specific issues in future lessons. Besides that, concordance is also very useful and helpful to language learners especially learners like us=)

Here are links for you to explore further...
http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_soft23.htm
http://www.melta.org.my/ET/1999/main6.html