4th POSTING: CONCORDANCE

Discussion and the summary of the article:
Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development, by Arshad Abd Samad.

Concordance is a list of alphabetical words that are program or design to assist language learners in today’s worlds. With the creation of concordance software, concordance program has become one of the tools for student’s teachers or any one who are willing to enhance their performance in language. With the ability to analyze sentences and word data, concordance program have made language learning more interesting. Language teaching and learning had evolved in a sense that students nowadays are offered to learn language through language puzzles, quizzes and games. In Malaysia, Universities such as Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Malaya, and Universiti Putra Malaysia had become one of the few early Universiti that are looking serious in the future of using the concordance program for the benefits of language learning in Malaysia.

The “Emas Corpora” that consist of close to half a million words (Arshad et al., 2002) is full of essays that are written by almost 800 students. With this amount of work, language learners are given the benefits to somewhat read trough a huge amount of writing and apply to the usage of concordance to expand their language learning process. Language is not static thus, language evolved through time and there are many ways to determine language development. As for example, the “Emas Corpora” had elected three group from different age to somewhat portrays the development of language trough age and time. Thus, it is true that from age and time, study shows that the usage of vocabulary and sentence productivity is different. With concordance program, one can easily examine the works of others and see the language development.

With concordance program, language productivity, range of vocabulary, and sophistication of vocabulary can easily being studied to a level where researchers are able to actually detect the numbers of sentence and word in an essay. Moreover, range of vocabulary and be detected trough the repeating usage of words in an essay. Concordance ability does not end there. With specialized programs such as RANGE (Nation, 2002), a vocabulary analysis program, enables language learners and researchers to actually indicate the typed of vocabulary used in a sentence structure. According to Nation (2002), the sources of the list in the program are A General Service list of English Words by Michael West (1953) for the first 2,000 words and the American Words List by Coxhead (2000) containing 570 word families.

As a conclusion, the usage of concordance in language teaching and learning, data mining and data clean-up, literary work and linguistic, translation, corpus linguistics, content analysis had been a great way to explore and learn language.

Gist of the discussion:

• The relevance of using concordance in language learning.
• The development language learning process.
• The new mindset of how languages are group in different prospect.
• The “Emas Corpora” data on language relating three groups.
  
  
  

Articles or publications on the applications of concordance:


1. Concordance (publishing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_ (publishing)


2. Concordance: software for concordance and text analysis.

http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/


3. LexisNexis: Concordance Litigation Document Management & e- Discovery.

http://law.lexisnexis.com/concordance