CONcorDaNcE™

Posting 5 is about CONCORDANCE. I have found two articles about concordance and its applications in language learning.

FIRST ARTICLE

The first article is about 'Is there any measurable learning from hands-on concordancing?’ by Tom Cobb, Division of Language Studies, City University of Hong Kong. To know more detail, you can read the summary that I have evaluated.

Summary

This article attempts to identify a specific learning effect that can be unambiguously attributed to the use of concordance software by language learners. A base-level hypothesis for learning from concordances is proposed, that a computer concordance might simulate and potentially rationalize off-line vocabulary acquisition by presenting new words in several contexts. To test this idea, an experimental lexical tutor was developed to introduce new words to subjects, either through concordances or through other sources of lexical information. In a series of tests involving transfer of word knowledge to novel contexts, a small but consistent gain was found for words introduced through concordances.

If you want to read more about this article, just link to http://www.lextutor.ca/cv/Hands_on.html

SECOND ARTICLE

The topic of the second article is ‘Giving learners something to do with concordance output’ by Tom Cobb. I hope that you can make the first view about this article by read my summary about it.

Summary

The article is about Hands-on learner concordance that has been regularly described for more than 15 years as an interesting approach in computer assisted language learning. However, it is not clear that concordance is ever used with any but advanced students (while the vast majority of language learners are intermediate), for more than a handful of guided sessions (which rarely lead to subsequent independent use), or that there is any demonstrated learning advantage of concordance over cheaper means of exploring a second language (e.g., dictionaries, grammar books, TV or cassettes).

You also can read this article by visit this web, http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/conference/papers/Cobb

My Own Personal View

Concordance is a tool or a program (software) that helps to list the words in context. Purpose for concordance is to analyze the text and it’s suitable for those who want to study texts closely or analyze language in depth. We can use concordance to make indexes and word lists. Secondly, we can use it to counting word frequencies. This can help us to make sure our work easier. Other than that, using concordance, we can compare different usages of a word, analyze keywords, find phrases and idioms, and publish it to the web. Applications of concordance, besides language teaching and learning we also can apply concordance as a data mining and data clean-up. Like me, I use it as our literary work and linguistic. 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 sub sentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories, creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing).