Fifth Posting

A concordancer is like a search engine that can be used for studying language (corpus linguistics). You simply enter a word or phrase that you want to know about and search in the normal way. Concordancers are a tools for corpus linguistics. Since most corpora (bodies of text) are incredibly large, it is a fruitless enterprise to search a corpus without the help of a computer. Concordance programs turn the electronic texts into databases which can be searched. Usually word queries are always possible, but most programs also offer the possibility of searching for word combinations within a specified range of words and of looking up parts of words (substrings, in particular affixes, for example). If the program is a bit more sophisticated, it might also provide its user with lists of collocates or frequency lists. The results are presented in a different way: instead of giving you a list of files or websites containing the search word or phrase, you'll get a list of phrases or sentences with the search word or phrase centred. This allows you to look for patterns, such as whether the word usually or frequently comes at the beginning of sentence or whether it is followed by certain words, like prepositions.

The first article that I have found is http://dspace.wul.waseda.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2065/1391/1/02.pdf. This article is about Candle Project which is uses various corpora and NLP technologies to construct an online English learning environment for learners in Taiwan. To enhance the Taiwan learners English proficiency effectively, Candle project provides English-Chinese parallel corpus, Sinorama, online bilingual concordancer, TotalRecall, and a collocation reference tool, TANGO, many online lessons, including extensive reading, verb-noun collocations, and vocabulary and an online collocation check program, MUST. The first subproject provides essential and advanced NLP tools and activity tracking mechanisms for the other three sub-projects to facilitate and monitor online learners. The second subproject focuses on construction and assessment of an intelligent self-access reading environment that adapts to learners’ English levels. The third subproject works on exploring the potential of learning English based on writing and translation exercises. The fourth sub-project uses the bilingual corpus to enhance culture-based English learning, an area that has not been fully explored yet. All four subprojects are innovative for natural language processing and English learning.

The second article is http://www.sfu.ca/~heift/Ling480/coursematerial/week4.pdf. This website talks about the meaning of concordancing which is accessing a corpuss of text to show how any given word or phrase in the texts is used in the immediate contexts in which it appears. Besides that, it tells us about corpus and corpus size which is the bigger the better for the study of lexis and collocation. There are basically two characteristic objectives for classroom concordancing, which are the teacher and the learner. For the teacher, concordancing is a source of input for teaching and input for material development while for the learner is for the error analysis and serendipity learning which like allow learners to use the concordancer as and when they wish for whatever purposes they wish and provides three benefits for the learner. Concordance material can be applied to both inductive and deductive reasoning. Concordancers also can be applied to testing and to error analysis or interlanguage studies. As a conclusion, there is more advantages than the disadvantages using concordance as concordance might be beyond the proficiency level of the learner.

The benefits of after distributing the concordance sheet, teachers can ask students to choose several examples that are meaningful to them and keep those examples in their language diaries. The purpose is to engage learners in exploring and noticing the language contexts; during the process of writing down those examples, learners are expected to undergo a cognitive process of digesting the language input. By engaging students in searching for answers from a corpus to solve problems, teachers can encourage students to devote more time to the learning activity.Moreover, the task-based learning can also develop learners' confidence in their ability once they accomplish the task. More importantly, it allows examples-of-use concordances to become available to many teachers and learners, enabling innovative uses of concordances in language teaching to be implemented. Concordance encourages students to realise the benefits of inducing their own rules from language data while the use of a teacher-chosen examples-of-use concordance is an effective teaching technique, it reinforces the erroneous viewpoint that the language points to be learnt are best chosen and presented by the teacher and may even encourage some students to believe that the only language points learnable are those presented to them by the teacher.