FIFTH POSTING

CONCORDANCES

WHAT IS CONCORDANCES?

An alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts, showing every contextual occurrence of a word.


Articles about Concordance and its Applications in Language Learning


FIRST ARTICLE


This article describes a Web-based English-Chinese concordance system, Total- Recall, developed to promote translation reuse and encourage authentic and idiomatic use in second language writing. We exploited and structured existing highquality translations from the bilingual Sinorama Magazine to build the concordance of authentic text and translation. Novel approaches were taken to provide high-precision bilingual alignment on the sentence, phrase and word levels. A browser-based user interface (UI) is also developed for ease of access over the Internet. Users can search for word, phrase or expression in English or Chinese. The Web-based user interface facilitates the recording of the user actions to provide data for further research.

http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P03/P03-2040.pdf


SECOND ARTICLE

This article is about how 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.


http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cv/Hands_on.html


The Benefits of Concordance to Language Learning and Language Teachers

My own personal view on what benefits concordance will give to language learning and language teachers are:

• learners can exposure their language by this way

• they easily can make indexes and word lists by using the concordances

• they also easily can count word frequencies

• concordances also can use for compare the different usages of a word

• Learners easily can analyze the keywords.

• they also easily can find phrases and idioms

• the task or any articles that had been concordance can publish to the web

• learners also can avoid from doing mistakes