Monday, March 30, 2009

Posting 5-Concordance

Summary of Teaching With Concordances By Katherine Moran and Luciana Diniz

Concordancer is a feature of a software program to analyze a corpus which is a collection of a whole text in a database. When a user searches for a word in a corpus, the concordancer returns all the occurrences of the word within its context of use. Concordancers display many examples of context in the same word to investigate the meanings and patterns of the word. From this, students can investigate the grammatical features of the word and analyze its examples. Corpus is an effective tool to learn language. If concordance line is analyzed they will become more independent by doing their analyzation. On a side note, corpus-based pedagogical materials are not widely available or used by teachers and learners in both ESL and EFL contexts according to (Hunston, 2002; Sinclair, 2004). This is because teachers could not fully make use of integrating corpus-based concordances into their instructional modules. Other than that, there are four steps to help students to practice on their own using concordance that is :

1. Activating schema.
2. Investigating.
3. Guiding analysis.
4. Follow up.

These framework that were given is useful to students for the use of concordance for analyzing a corpus.

Taken from: http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/article.asp?vid=192&DID=3503&sid=1&cid=768&iid=3491&nid=3303

Concordancing in Language Learning By John Flowerdew

Concordancing is define as accessing a corpus of content to illustrate how any given word or phrase in the passage is used in the direct contexts in which it appears. By gathering these particular words the concordancer display the pattern of which these word is used. Early usage of concordancing was in the field of lexicography and constructing dictionary and also in the field of stylistics and literary research, as well linguistic research. However, today concordancing is said to have an impact on organization and language teaching. Also, there are more detailed explanation on the software and corpus, the types of corpus and application in the article via the link below.


Link:

http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=cache:dGPVpVtJKFMJ:sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/10/1000064.pdf+author:%22Flowerdew%22+intitle:%22Concordancing+in+language+learning%22+


My personal view on concordancing and its benefits.

In my opinion concordance is a useful method for learning language as it let you to determine the meaning and patterns of words. The four framework mentioned above can be considered as language teaching points such as vocabulary acquisition, differences in synonym use, usage variation in register or genre, preposition choice, semantic prosody, or word connotation. There are also benefits in concordancing to learning language such as it can be considered an input to for teaching and materials development. It can also be used for error analysis and to develope students to be more independent in learning language. Lastly concordance can also be applicable for the use of inductive or deductive reasoning.

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