Concordance (posting 5)

What is Concordance?

The first concordance, to the Bible, appeared in 1736. Its compiler was Alexander Cruden, born in 1701 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and a graduate of Marischal College, one of Aberdeen's two universities. His great work won him honour; until the later part of the twentieth century, concordances had to be compiled by hand.

A concordance is a comprehensive index of the words used in a text or a body of texts. Usually there are also citations of the passages in which the words occur.

A concordance will also show quickly how often any word is used. Just as significantly, it can show you what words are not used! Such features offer special insights into the issues or themes which are important or recurrent in a text - and they may not be quite what you expect!

Its simplest use is as an index, to locate quickly any passage in a text. All you need to know is one word from the passage: look up that word in a concordance to the text and you will find the passage.

What benefits concordance will give to language learning and language teachers?

For Language Learning

• Error Analysis

A guided use of the concordancer by the learner is in error analysis and correction. In this activity, the teacher signifies errors in student writing which can be investigated and corrected by means of the concordancer. 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 concordancer.

• Serendipity Learning

The easiest, most obvious and most autonomous learner application of concordancing is to allow learners to use the concordancer as and when they wish for whatever purpose they wish. This type of usage has been referred to as serendipity learning (Johns, 1988). It is similar in a way to browsing in a dictionary.

Serendipity learning has at least three obvious benefits:

• Learners -are truly autonomous and responsible for their own learning.
• Because searches are learner-initiated it can be guaranteed that the learning corresponds to
• learner needs and/or wants.
• By researching into language use this way learners develop an overall language awareness(James and Garrett, 1991)

• Inductive Learning

Concordance material can be used in both ways, such as deductive and inductive.

Deductive- If a teacher explains that he/she is teaching the contrast between the present continuous and present perfect, explains the difference in meaning, and presents concordances to illustrate both, then this is a deductive approach.

Inductive- Besides that, if the learner is told to work out a rule to differentiate between the two tenses, using concordance printouts, then it is inductive.

Levy (1990) proposes that the learner might use the concordancer in the following ways:

• checking meaning
• checking general syntax
• checking usage
• exploring special lexis especially ESP vocabulary
• checking derived forms
• checking collocates of words
• exploring set pieces, e.g. phrasal verbs, cliches

For the Language Teacher

• As a Linguistic Informant

How might teachers go about using a concordance as a linguistic informant?
For example, suppose a teacher wanted to refresh his/her memory on the use of for and since. Concordances of the two words would quickly reveal that for is typically followed by a period of time “‘for three years”, etc.) while since is followed by a point in time (since 1987, etc.). Such a statement, of course, might be found in a grammar book, but the concordancer will give a much greater range of examples and nuances and will show the preferred collocations these two items enter into: for example, the concordancer is likely to show that since is typically followed by a time expression, since Friday, since 194.5, but also, less frequently, to a person or thing, since Margaret Thatcher, since the budget.

• As a Sources 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 present perfect, instead of teachers trusting to their intuitions and making up examples to illustrate contrasting uses, these can be derived from the concordancer. Similarly, in presenting new vocabulary, concordances can provide examples of authentic contextualized examples.

If the concordancer is kept in the classroom, then the teacher can even run a concordance when a problem of usage arises during teaching. For example, if a student is having difficulty with distinctions of meaning between the modals can and could, and then the teacher can call up, or have the student call up, instances of usage of these two modal forms and by means of the examples conduct an analysis of the different.

• As Input for Materials Development

This is where there is an advantage to be had in preparing concordance based teaching materials in advance. In this way, for example, 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 easily be done by converting the concordance file into a word processing format. An extension of this editing facility is the production of exercise material based directly on a concordance. For example the type of material such as a gap filling exercise.

The another uses of Concordance also are :

• Analyzing keywords
• Analyzing word frequencies
• Finding and analyzing phrases and idioms
• Creating indexes and word lists
• Comparing different usages of the same word:
  

URL

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=what+is+concordance&page=1&qsrc=0&ab=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dundee.ac.uk%2Fenglish%2Fconc2.htm
http://www.ecml.at/projects/Voll/our_resources/graz_2001/authentic/concordancers/menu_concordancers.htm#What
http://www.eisu2.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/stevens.htm
http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/10/1000064.pdf