This assignment was done in pair whereby my pair was Jamal Mohammad. Concordance softwares such as Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Microconcord help in the boring task of analyzing language data and greatly extended the potential of a corpus in language pedagogy. The database called corpora helps to inform on how words and grammatical constructions are used which proves to be very useful to teachers, students and also researchers.
According to Schmitt (2002:34), using a corpus in language learning language captures students in a whole new way instead of making them just memorizing rules of English, as what it has been done all this while. A lot of studies have been done regarding concordance and how it helps but the one that is discussed in detail in this chapter is English of Malaysian School Students (EMAS) corpus which was investigated by researchers from UPM, on language development using language production and lexical variety.
The EMAS corpus collected in 2002 and consists nearly half a million words in the form of three different essays written by nearly 800 students which involved Year 5, Form 1, and Form 4 students. The major criterion of selecting the topics was the amount of language the topics could elicit. This was why picture series topics were taken because students were expected to write better based on the things that they were familiar with such as incidents at a river.
Various methods can be used to determine the language development. But however, the research was based on the assumption that development of language patterns can be seen from comparing language usage of three different age groups. The performance of students was valued from various aspects such as language productivity, range of vocabulary and sophistication of vocabulary. Language productivity is indicated by the number of sentences per essay and the word per sentence. From this survey, we can detect a gradual increase in the number of sentences, sentences per essay and words per sentence from the standard 5 to Form 4 levels. It is encouraging to note that the older students produce longer essays, as well as longer and more complex sentences. Another aspect is range of vocabulary. The diversity of the vocabulary used in a corpus is determined by calculating the type to token ratio. This ratio is calculated by dividing the number of separate words in a text by the number of words in the text. The investigation indicates that the type to token ratio gradually increases from the lower to the higher age of groups. This signifies that the older respondents use a wider range of vocabulary in their essays. EMAS corpus is also a learner corpus that retained the students spelling and grammatical errors. Moving on to the other aspect which is sophistication of the vocabulary can be determined by using specialized software such as RANGE. It is a vocabulary analysis program which gives an indication of kinds of vocabulary used. This program analyses text by comparing it to several base lists of frequently used words. With this program, they observed that clear developments in the sophistication of vocabulary were used which is older age groups use a wider range and more sophisticated words.
In conclusion, the results of the concordance and analysis indicate some form of development in terms of language production as well as vocabulary range and sophistication based on written data of three age groups.
Besides that, we are also required to search in the internet for articles or publications on the applications of concordance and choose one of the following and give examples of the applications of concordance in : language teaching and learning, data mining and data clean-up, literary work and linguistic, translation, corpus linguistics and content analysis. In this given list, I have decided to write and discuss about “Applications of concordance in language teaching and learning” for my assignment in fourth posting.
Based on all my researches and findings from the internet, I have found out that concordance softwares are being beneficial and gives you the most effective, cost-efficient way to manage the high volume of documents, including depositions, transcripts, e-mail and other e-discovery - generated during litigation. Based on this link : "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_%28publishing%29" a concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them. Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional materials, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances. However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper.
Next, a bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text. A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The most well known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible.
Strong's Concordance
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, generally known as Strong's Concordance, is a concordance of the King James Bible (KJV) that was constructed under the direction of Dr. James Strong (1822–1894) and first published in 1890. Dr. Strong was Professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary at the time. It is an exhaustive cross-reference of every word in the KJV back to the word in the original text. Unlike all other Biblical reference books, the purpose of Strong's Concordance is not to provide content or commentary about the Bible, but to provide an index to the Bible. This allows the reader to find words where they appear in the Bible. This index allows a student of the Bible to re-find a phrase or passage previously studied or to compare how the same topic is discussed in different parts of the Bible.
Strong's Concordance includes:
The 8674 Hebrew root words used in the Old Testament.
The 5624 Greek root words used in the New Testament.
James Strong did not construct Strong's Concordance by himself; it was constructed with the effort of more than a hundred colleagues. It has become the most widely used concordance for the King James Bible.
The Strong's concordance is a very useful tool for studying the scriptures. It takes every single word of the King James Version and lists where each word can be found in the scriptures. It is useful for locating scripture verses that you know the words to, but don't know the book, chapter and verse.
Bible Concordance / Dictionary
This concordance / dictionary will help you learn the meaning of some important words in the Bible. It will also tell you where in the Bible to read about that subject or person. Please note that this is not intended to be an exhaustive concordance but a resource to help you understand some important words in the Bible.
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, analyzing keywords, analyzing word frequencies, finding and analyzing 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).
KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context, the most common format for concordance lines. A KWIC index is formed by sorting and aligning the words within an article title to allow each word (except the stop words) in titles to be searchable alphabetically in the index. It was a useful indexing method for technical manuals before computerized full text search became common. The term permuted index is another name for a KWIC index, referring to the fact that it indexes all cyclic permutations of the headings. Books composed of many short sections with their own descriptive headings, most notably collections of manual pages, often ended with a permuted index section, allowing the reader to easily find a section by any word from its heading. This practice is no longer common today.
A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. The output of a concordancer may serve as input to a translation memory system for computer-assisted translation, or as an early step in machine translation. Concordancers are also used in corpus linguistics to retrieve alphabetically or otherwise sorted lists of linguistic data from the corpus in question, which the corpus linguist then analyzes. Some concordancers used in corpus linguistics are AntConc (Freeware), ApSIC Xbench, WordSmith, MonoConc, GlossaNet, and CorpusEye. AntConc is a freeware concordance program for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems developed by Laurence Anthony of Waseda University, Japan. AntConc can generate KWIC concordance lines and concordance distribution plots. It also has tools to analyze word clusters (lexical bundles), n-grams, collocates, word frequencies, and keywords.Although the program was originally designed for use in classrooms, it has a powerful set of tools that are useful to researchers, including wildcard and regular expression searches.One useful feature of the program is the ability to process texts in almost any language in the world, including Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It is fully UNICODE compliant and the developer welcomes comments from users and actively works to improve the software.
Concordance is 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.
There are numerous articles regarding to the subject of concordance in language learning. But one problem that we faced in the search of articles on the application of concordance is the language itself. Most of the articles are constructed in a complicated language of English, thus proving it difficult to understand concordance and the application of it in today’s world. However, we managed to come across an article that is written in simple English which can be understood by all. The concerning article is taken from http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0224.html and gives a very good explanation on teaching English vocabulary.
According to this article, the best way to learn what a concordancer can do is to use one. We merely need to enter a word or vocabulary item in an input box similar to that of a Search Engine. The concordancer will return some example sentences from corpus data illustrating how the word is most frequently used. Some concordancers allow you the option or oblige you to select the categories of corpus data targeted by your search. However, if we limit our corpus data to the stories of Agatha Christie, certain search strings will yield few results.
If learners have access to the Internet, teachers can set them classwork or homework which involves the use of a concordancer. The tasks teachers give the learners could focus on vocabulary (e.g. lexical items in collocation), grammar (syntagmatic relations) or contexts in which syntax and semantics combine to differentiate meanings (e.g. "I think" versus "I am thinking"). It is possible to ask the concordancer to return a list of example sentences where strings of more than one word occur and it is also possible to focus on morphemes or difficult consonant clusters within individual words.
Computer users without Internet access may find more difficulty in gaining access to corpus material. However, the size of computer hard disks still provides scope for vocabulary study, especially work at word level on prefixes, suffixes, initial, medial and final consonant blends [containing 2, 3 or 4 parts]. If you still have a copy of the popular Word Processor, WordPerfect 5.1, you may be familiar with a very useful utility called SPELL, which is accessed from the "wp5.1" directory rather through the main component of the software. This utility permits you to search the large number of words contained in WP5.1's Spell Check files and is excellent for solving crossword clues which you cannot otherwise complete. If you enter the consonant cluster *pth* as a search string, it will return the results 1. depth 2. depths 3. opthalmitis 4. upthrow 5. upthrows
6.upthrust 7.upthrusts.
In conclusion, concordancer is thus a very good way to analyze words, phrases or even sentences without having complications.
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