CONCORDANCE ~ Literature and Linguistic students' best companion…

For this 6^th and final posting, I’m once again partnered with my course mate, Sim Ming Quan in the task of analyzing Concordance.

Before going into the discussion on the article “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad. We’ll begin with the definition of the Concordance. According to Wikipedia, Concordance is ‘an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts’.

Here’s a little information from Wikipedia on Concordance application useful in linguistics. As students of linguistic, it is undeniable that Concordance plays a very useful role especially in our language learning process. Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics for the study of a text, such as:

• Comparing different usages of the same word
• Analyzing keywords
• Analyzing word frequencies
• Finding and analyzing phrases and idioms
• Finding translations of sub sentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories
• Creating indexes and word lists (useful for publishing)

“Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” - The Summary

The main purpose of the article “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad page 70 in OTL text is to show the use of Concordances in the investigation of language development. “The language corpus offers a useful resource in language pedagogy.” According to (Woolard, 2000), concordance was previously used as the basis of dictionaries and teaching materials and now it has been improved by the use of concordance software. The corpus aids in a way that it informs how words and grammatical constructions are used. In addition, it also makes language teaching and learning more interesting [Schmitt (2002:34)].

Much effort has been done by the local universities such as University Technology Malaysia (UTM), University Malaya (UM) and University Putra Malaysia (UPM) in developing concordance. One of the results from the effort is EMAS corpus by researches from UPM and it is based on the data of this corpus that this article investigates language development. The EMAS was developed in 2002, consisting almost half a million words (Arshad et al., 2002) and it contains written data in the form of three essays written by around 800 students ranging from primary school to secondary school students. The corpus has proven that most students are average in their English language proficiency. The research was conducted with all the students involved given three essays on several topics which are suitable for their levels and they are given guidelines to write the essay. They are expected to write well if they are familiar with the topic. Pictorial or visual prompt are used to get the optimize result from the students. As the investigating development was carried out, the focus was on specific target structures and it examines the acquisition of these structures for a period of time. The data in EMAS is cross sectional and the development patterns are implied by comparing the language use of three different age group. The corpus is done by studying the language productivity and vocabulary use. The language productivity is indicated by the number of sentences per essay and the words per sentence. The studies show a gradual increase based on their groups. Those that are in the higher group produce more sentences and more use of words.

The diversity of the vocabulary used in corpus is often determined by calculating the type of token ratio (Schmitt, 2002). The higher ratio indicates more usage of uncommon words while the lower ratio indicates a limited number of words. In examining the sophistication of vocabulary, the nonsensical words in essays are deleted, proper names are excluded and the misspelled words are corrected in order to produce an effective research. This process is determined by using the software such as RANGE (Nation, 2002). As to be expected, the lower grades students used most words from the lowest level or better known as the category of most frequent 1000 English words consisting of 4000 forms and types while the older age groups tend to use a wider range of words. As a conclusion, the use of concordance in this study shows that students with higher level education can apply more words in English. They are able to express their feelings and thoughts in the essay using more choices of words. However, the EMAS corpus was done in the year 2002, it is encouraged that another research should be conducted in the coming years so that we are able to show whether there is improvement in Malaysia’s language programs, as noted by Hunston (2002).

The gist of the discussion of the article

Basically, the article tells us in depth of the use of concordance. On the apparent, it may just seem like you’re reading a research or study that was carried out. When we first came across the article, our first respond towards it was: “Hmmm….so how exactly are we supposed to summarize this? It does not provide us information we need to about concordance to complete the blog task!” As a matter of fact, after putting some thoughts into it, it is basically concordance put into use in the effort of improving language teaching and learning. If read critically, the article actually provides detailed information about the use of concordance; only that it wasn’t told directly. This article has attempted to present the relevant of corpus data in inspecting language development without having to analyze concordance lines. Based on all of the summarization, we can see that the concordance is used to make index and word list, count words frequencies, compare different usage of a word, analyze keywords, find phrases and idioms and lastly publish to the web.

We’ve browse through the web for to search for the applications of concordance in literary work and linguistic. There are plenty that turned up from the search making it impossible for us to go through it all and but here’s some articles and publications regarding to concordance application in literary work and linguistic.

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York has included Concordance as one of the main resource for English and American Literature study. The passage below adapted from their webpage, <http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/guides/poetry.html#1> shows and explains in great detail on how to find words and passages of poetry. Let’s be honest here, me and my partner is obviously still learners and still in the progress of furthering our understanding towards the usage of concordance; so instead of hearing from us, we thought it’d be better to share the knowledge we’ve obtained to readers of our blogs that comes from the expert.

Poems - Locating and Researching Poetry

Using a Concordance to Find Words or Passages in a Poem

Suppose you are writing a paper on William Butler Yeats and you remember the following phrase:

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

The passage is relevant to your topic, but you can't remember which poem it's from. To find the passage, consult a CONCORDANCE. Concordances gather all the words of a certain work or author and arrange them in alphabetical order. Each word is followed by a citation to the appropriate line or passage where the word appears. Most concordances include the surrounding words or line in which the word appears. When using a concordance, try looking up an important word in the passage. For instance, if you look up "smithy" in the concordance of Yeats, you will find:

SMITHY : LIKE SPARKS BLOWN OUT OF A SMITHY, AND DIE?...170 SECRET ROSE 30

This tells you that the passage you are looking for is line 30 of the poem "The Secret Rose," which can be found on page 170 of the Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. The introduction to the concordance will tell you which edition or volume the page number refers to. Some concordances refer to two or more editions for greater convenience, usually an "authoritative" edition or a variorum edition. (A variorum edition records differences in the various editions and/or manuscripts.) Remember, concordances don't contain the actual poems, they just tell you which poems contain the word you're looking for. You can then find the poem in the edition listed in the concordance or in any "complete" edition of the poet's works.

To find a concordance to the works of your poet, try a keyword search in the catalog using the poet's name and the word concordance? The ? will retrieve catalog records with "concordance" (usually used in the title) or "concordances" (usually used in the subject headings). For example:

k=yeats and concordance?

k=lorca and concordance?

<http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/guides/poetry.html#1>

Besides that, we’ve also found a publication that applies Concordance as an open source on Shakespeare’s work. The site was built for four attributes: “Power, Flexibility, Friendliness, and Openness” and Concordance is an exploit for looking up words from the poems. To find a word and its links to Shakespeare’s poem, there are choices of typing out the word, it can be either the exact spelling, just the first part of the word form or any part of the word will do as well. “What is a word form? A word like "play" can take several forms, like plays, playing, and played. Each word form is listed in the database, along with the number of times the word form occurs in the text collection.”

Options to choose any letters from A to Z are also provided. Beside the alphabet itself for example A, the numbers of inventory with words in Shakespeare’s work that begins with an A is also stated- “A (1,569)” After picking an alphabet, the whole list of words will be displayed, by selecting any one of the words, where the word occurs in text will be shown. For example, by clicking on ‘abides (8)’, the page will show as below.

Shakespeare concordance: All instances of "abides"

abides occurs 8 times in 8 lines within 7 works. Possibly related word: abide Look up "abides" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (offsite link; may not be found) The links below will show abides in each listed work, or you may want to see all the instances at once.

Antony and Cleopatra (1) Henry IV, Part II (1) Henry VI, Part II (1) Measure for Measure (1) Much Ado about Nothing (1) Richard III (2) Timon of Athens (1)

Where the word ‘abides’ occurred in Shakespeare work is not only listed, but even the links to his particular masterpiece is provided. As a literature student, I must say it is very useful because in most of our essays, we’re required to quote from the actual text and finding that particular phrase can be a difficult time consuming task. We remember certain words from the phrase but we can’t possibly memorize the whole phrase and this is when publications as such with the applications of concordance come in handy.

Another great website that that applies Concordance usages and is highly recommended for literature students is ‘The Concordance Workbooks’.

“This site is devoted to the study of literature using literary computer concordances, a form of analyzing text. This document will attempt to help students understand what is meant by literary concordancing and will ask questions about featured Romantic writers which may be answered by using the English department concordance site.”

<http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/conc.htm>

To further understand corpus linguistics and its connection to ELT, the website below can also be referred to.

http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~kprzemek/Chapter1.pdf

To have discovered this software program is indeed beneficiary and as stated in the title for this posting, Concordance can be a companion that students’ of literature and linguistic would not want to lose. Language productivity and bombastic vocabulary use can now be widened. On the occasion that this would be the last posting for this course, I must once again emphasize the awareness I’ve gained towards the use of ICT in developing extensive English language studies. The mission of completing the tasks handed out to us throughout the course has been an interesting and an enlightening journey. It is an eye-opener to have discovered all the effort done to improve the education system in order to produce competitive future leaders of our nation. So much more opportunities and possibilities are laid ahead now. With hope, I’d love to see the day when I can return the offer and contribute my part with all the knowledge and insights I’ve gained throughout my literature undertakings.