Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development

Hello lovely people!

In this posting, which is my forth posting, I have to work together with my partner, Puteri to understand and summarized the article “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad in Online Teaching and Learning in ELT book.

In 2002, a study was conducted using the EMAS (English of Malaysian School Students) corpus which consist of students from year 5 of primary school, form 1 and form 4 of secondary school where they were ask to produce essays from three different given topics. Their language productivity and vocabulary used was studied to examine their developmental patterns. It was found that the numbers of sentences, sentences per essay, words, and words per sentences from the three different level essays shows an increase due to the maturity of the students.

Teachers, researchers and language learners typically observe concordance lines to determine how words and grammatical constructions are used. Schmitt (2002: 34) argues that the benefit is that it may help students to look at the systematic of language as an interesting linguistics puzzle.

Use In Linguistics

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 subsentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories
• creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)

Example:

Unfinished Thoughts on Light

Light

Light dances

Light flickers

Light sparks

Light marks you

Light can envelop you

Light you can envelop,

Must be a rare commodity…

Light can become you,

Light does a lot of things,

Sometimes you can feel

As light as light,

But it seems

Light,

As light as it seems

Has great weight…

-hey man,

Got a light?





Once,

I tried to light

My smoke on a light bulb,

Couldn’t find my light…

Nowadays, we have to

Conserve electricity

So,

I guess you can’t light your smoke

On those light bulbs

I feel light, writing about light

It didn’t work

By the way,

Lighting my smoke on

A light bulb

I think,

I’ll have more thoughts

On light

Another day

Jonathan Edwin Allen

Reference:

Online Teaching and Learning in ELT

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/

www.wikipedia.org