5th POSTING

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

For the fifth posting, we need to find 2 articles about concordance and its applications in language learning. The links for readers to get to the articles online shuld also be provide. Then we need to post the summary of these two articles and add in our own personal view on what benefits concordance will give to language learning and language teachers.


A Case For Using A Parallel Corpus and Concordancer For Beginners of A Foreign Language

Summary

There is a study have been carried out by the pilot in order to verify whether concordance is an appropriate teaching tools of German for the beginners. The beginner was asked to figure out the answer of unfamiliar and unknown vocabulary and create proper grammar rules for himself using concordance as the one and only tool. As a result, the concordamcer perform very well in helping the beginner and it brings great benefit to the beginner in learning a language.


http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num3/stjohn/



Is there any measurable learning from hands-on concordancing?

Summary
This is an article on a study which aims to identify a specific learning effect that learners can be clearly attributed to the application of concordance software. A base hypothesis has been planned from concordances for learning. The hypothesis is a concordance might reproduce the vocabulary by present new word in several contexts. A test has been launched in order to justify the hypothesis above. There is a trial lexical tutor was developed to introduce new words to subject. This can only be done whether through concordances or other sources of lexical information. A final hypothesis has been found after a series of word transferring test which is words do introduced through concordances.


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


Benefit of concordance to language learning and teaching

In my opinion, concordancer helps to improve learner vocabulary. This is because learner can see all the words that been used in an article easily and systematically. They can easily recognize the word that they don’t understand then refer to dictionary soon after concordancing. In spite of it, it may enhance learner writing skill as well by providing as much vocabulary as it could. For language teaching, the teacher can use the concordancer to help the beginner of language in order to improve their vocabulary so that they can compete with the others. Other than that, teacher can use concordancer to enhance their own vocabulary as well. This also helps them easy in marking student’s paper and analyzes student’s works or essay.