111 EDU 401 Concordancing

Concordancing: 

Concordancing Kingdom of Saudi Arabia The Royal Commission at Yanbu Yanbu University College Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah x Applied linguistics Department Educational Technology EDU 401-111 2011-2012

Slide 2: 

11/13/2011 Practical use

What is a ‘corpus’?: 

What is a ‘corpus’? A ‘collection of words’ corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed) Thus, in the case of language, we are talking about a body of language - a collection, usually computer-stored, of language which can then be used for analysis. Bank of English (University of Birmingham): 250 million words British National Corpus (BNC Consortium): 100 million words (90% written, 10% spoken) ( http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ ) Searchable using computer software and the Internet

What is concordance? : 

What is concordance? 11/13/2011 A “concordance”, according to the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987) , is: “An alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and often how it is used .”

What is concordance? : 

What is concordance? 11/13/2011 A basic manual concordance taken from Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet” give us very accurate information about the way language is authentically used can be used to search, access and analyze language from a corpus.

What is concordance? : 

What is concordance? 11/13/2011 So, a concordance is a list of words (called keywords , e.g. here "sin"), taken from a piece of authentic language ( corpus , e.g. here Romeo and Juliet ), displayed in the centre of the page and shown with parts of the contexts in which they occur (here maximum 29 characters to the left of the keyword and to the right). This is also known as a Key Words In Context concordance or a KWIC concordance. A basic manual concordance taken from Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

What is concordance? : 

What is concordance? 11/13/2011 only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them. A basic manual concordance taken from Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

What is concordancing? : 

What is concordancing? 11/13/2011 The software used for doing this are often called KWIC concordancers ( Key Words In Context). Concordancing is the act of picking out examples of a given word in context.

Slide 10: 

A concordancer is a piece of software that searches a corpus ( a collection of texts in electronic form) for a selected word or phrase and presents every instance of that word or phrase in the centre of the computer screen, with the words that come before and after it to the left and right.

Slide 11: 

A node word is a selected word, appearing in the centre of the screen. A concordance is the lines of text illustrating the search word, the node

Concordancer: 

Concordancer a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance 11/13/2011 a piece of software , either installed on a computer or accessed through a website typical concordancers allows us to enter a word or phrase search for multiple examples of how that word or phrase is used more complex concordancers can extract examples from very particular contexts and even discriminate between spoken or written language use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbwgruJ4_gA: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbwgruJ4_gA 11/13/2011 This is the video that teach you how to use the concordancer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbwgruJ4_gA

Concordancer: 

Concordancer Concordancers are also used in corpus linguistics to retrieve alphabetically or otherwise sorted lists of linguistic data from the corpus in question. 11/13/2011 WordSmith Tools Microconcord Monoconc Collins CoBuild

Online Concordancers: 

Online Concordancers 11/13/2011 Thus, for example if we are interested in the word “ stand” the concordancing program would search out all examples of the word and place them in rows with the word “stand” in the middle. Have a look below to give you some idea of what a concordance line looks like, using the word ‘media’ taken from the Video Corpus. A computer-generated concordance

Linguistics: 

Linguistics Concordances are frequently used in linguistics, when studying a text. For example: comparing different usages of the same word analysing keywords analysing word frequencies finding and analysing phrases and idioms creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing) 11/13/2011

In the classroom: Some teaching ideas: 

In the classroom: Some teaching ideas 11/13/2011 Rather than tell students a particular rule, students can be given a set of concordances and asked to discover for themselves what rules can be deduced from the evidence. This could be something simple such as discovering that the verb form that changes the third person . Find the rule So what can you do in the classroom with a corpus? There are several things that can be done very easily:

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 This is the most simple and most corpus analysis tools will give you the frequency lists of texts. This is perhaps not very interesting, but it can show - apart from all the grammar and function words - which special words, for example, in a given genre are the most frequent. Looking at Frequency In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom: 

In the classroom 11/13/2011 For example, a business English student wants to know more about how the word market is used. The word can be keyed in and the collocates examined. In this way new collocates and even idiomatic phrases can be seen in context and learned. Looking at Collocations

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

Many common words have a number of usages and meanings. Students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage. 11/13/2011 Categorize In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 With the advent of cheap and free authoring software it is now possible to create ones own internet quizzes (see 'hot Potato'). With such software it is possible to create quizzes in which students have to fill gaps. Just as these gaps can be part of a larger passage of text, they can also be part of concordance lines. As a computer quiz In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 For more advanced students you can use a corpus for them to see how certain grammatical patterns are used in real speech/writing. In 1988, Johns use a corpus to get his students to look at the differences when the word “to” is used as an infinitive and when it is used as a preposition. He also asked them to look at how the words “therefore” and “hence” differentiated in their use. Getting students to see grammatical patterns: In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 Concordances are an efficient way of providing students with a large amount of example sentences. These examples can be sorted so that similar usages appear together. Certainly, a dictionary contains examples, but often examples are too few. Example sentences In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 Again, another very simple old exercise. Take sentences from the corpus and split the sentences in half. Then ask the students to put them back together again. Linking sentences In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 Many common words have a number of usages and meanings. Students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage. Put in order In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 The old standard gap-fill type exercises are much better when you can take them directly from an authentic corpus - just  remove collocates or key words and get the students to fill them back in again. Fill in the gaps In the classroom: Some teaching ideas

In the classroom:Some teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 Finding genuine examples In the classroom: Some teaching ideas Understanding different meanings/uses Looking at their own errors Collect example sentences from a corpus- group the sentences according to their meanings Make collocation errors-put the root word into the concordancer-Can discover what the errors by themselves

For more teaching ideas: 

11/13/2011 Check the handout about more a advantages of using concordancers in language classroom For more teaching ideas

Some Possible Problems : 

Some Possible P roblems Majority of corpora are based on authentic language use - far too challenging for lower level students. Not all concordancer interfaces are user-friendly and some can be very complex for students to use- often uses quite complex linguistic terminology. simple alternative is to use any normal search engine and type in the word you are interested in. Not all teachers and students have access to the Internet during class.

Summary: 

Summary Often seem challenging to both teachers and students. Incorporating concordancers into L&T process may take time and effort. Ultimately can be an incredibly useful tool for L&T process.

Lab Work: 

Go to the tutorial on the files’ section: How to use a concordancers http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers 2. Start exploring and follow the steps 3. Next, go to http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html .Choose a new corpus and see if there are any differences between spoken and written English. Lab Work

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Questions?

References: 

References How to use concordances in teaching English: Some suggestions http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterrs/concordancing/usingconcs.html using concordance programs in the Modern Foreign Languages classroom http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm