Concordance, Concordancing

The aim of this essay is to critically discuss the integration of CALL in the ESL classroom with a specific focus on concordance-based vocabulary instruction. The essay explores CALL research on second language learning and suggests that CALL can enhance the quality of vocabulary teaching. The role of concordance-based method in vocabulary teaching is presented through the examination of empirical studies. Finally, pedagogical benefits of language corpora are being evaluated under the concept of Data Driven Learning (DDL)

Vocabulary can be taught and learned in a variety of ways. The purpose of this paper is
elaborating on three different approaches to teaching and learning vocabulary: implicit learning,
explicit learning and Data Driven Learning. Implicit learning mainly happens when the mind
is not focused on learning vocabulary, but somewhere else, such as understanding a text. In
contrast, explicit learning occurs through instruction by which learners’ attention is focused on
vocabulary as a language item. Apart from explicit and implicit approaches to teaching and
learning vocabulary, learning vocabulary through Data Driven Learning (DDL) is discussed in this
paper. DDL is a kind of inductive learning approach through which learners become their own
researchers finding examples and developing their own rules for language learning. Included in
this paper are some practical suggestions for enhancing vocabulary learning through each of
these three approaches.

This LIA International Conference and Cultural Events 2015 proceeding elaborates how a freeware concordancer named  AntConc facilitates teaching and learning of grammar to 21st century learners and it suggests some activities to encourage students' self-discovery and induction of grammar structure

The aim of this thesis is to discover if there could be a considerable presence of countable usages among the concordance lines of the British National Corpus of 36 nouns retrieved from two grammars and a learner’s dictionary. The two grammars taken into analysis are the Collins Cobuild English Grammar by Penny Hands and Practical English Usage by Michael Swan, while the dictionary is the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. A remarkable number of countable usages in the concordance lines could contradict what has been stated by the grammars and the dictionary.
The analysis of a large corpus like the British National Corpus could be very revealing since sometimes grammars and dictionaries give examples and append labels like those analysed in this thesis (“uncountable/usually uncountable”, “countable/usually countable”, “only singular” and “only plural”) that are often not confirmed by the sentences and utterances present inside corpora.
At the end of the present work the findings will be summarised and will be determined if the analysis of the concordance lines of the British National Corpus will have provided insightful results in relation to the uncountable status of each noun. In other words, the analysis aims at determining if the concordance lines of the corpus back up or not the information provided by the grammars and the dictionary.
The program used for investigating the corpus is Sketch Engine, which is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing since 2003. It is a very useful tool for people studying language behaviour (lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or language learners), since it is possible to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine derives its name from the Word Sketch, one of the key features: “it is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour”. Currently, it supports corpora in more than 90 languages.

""The Heidegger Concordance offers a comprehensive list of the most relevant concepts in Heidegger’s Collected Works [Gesamtausgabe] and their corresponding occurrences in all 79 published volumes. This book is the first index of Heidegger’s complete writings and will help scholars and students find their way through the almost 40 000 pages published up to now. In order to enable English-speaking readers to use the index, the Concordance also includes a complete German-English Glossary.


Table of Contents

Presentation
Index of German Terms
Index of Greek Terms
Index of Latin Terms
Index of Proper Names
Index of Cited Works
German-English Glossary""

The present study investigated how 6 Korean graduate students at a Canadian university used a suite of multiple Web-based reference resources (named i-Conc), consisting of concordancers and dictionaries, as a cognitive tool for solving linguistic problems encountered over the course of completing—in English, their second language (L2)—an academic writing assignment for one of their graduate courses. Using a mixed methods design employing surveys, interviews, screen recordings, a query tracking log, and detailed case studies, the thesis provides rich descriptions of (a) the processes, and outcomes of the 6 participants’ uses of i-Conc as a reference tool for their writing authentic academic tasks and (b) their perceptions of the suite as a means of writing assistance. Overall, i-Conc served as an intellectual partner that aided the participants in strategically solving lexical and grammatical problems during their writing assignments: About 70 % of the problems they addressed with i-Conc resulted in correct text formulations or revisions. The different resources in i-Conc were each shown to have unique functions for which they were best suited, suggesting that concordancing may optimally be consulted in combination with, not in place of, other resources. The benefits of consulting i-Conc for L2 writing went beyond simply helping the participants’ problem solving to potentially facilitating their language acquisition. Input-feedback interactions with the reference suite prompted the participants to carry out robust meaning negotiations in their efforts to verify their intuitive hypotheses and to venture beyond their current linguistic repertoires. Participants acted on these potential benefits somewhat differently. Case studies and cross-case analyses demonstrated complex interactions between the participants’ individual traits and goals, the educational contexts for which they were writing, and their perceptions and evaluations of particular affordances provided by i-Conc. These findings imply that to build meaningful cognitive partnerships with reference tools, L2 writers should receive progressive guidance on principles for effective reference resource consultation along with training in strategies for using different types of resources, contingent on individuals’ abilities and ongoing needs arising from their macro and micro contexts for writing and for language learning.

This study tries to explore the effects of teaching lexical collocations (verb+noun) explicitly through a teaching program in a translation education context. The collocation teaching program is named as Lexical Collocation Teaching for Translation (LCTT). The implementation of LCTT program to the students of Translation and Interpreting in English took 10 weeks totally. It includes pre and post-tests; finding verb +noun collocations from an English novel through a concordance tool, Compleatlextutor (http://lextutor.ca/concordancers/); spotting and analysing verb +noun collocation pairs from a Turkish novel and its English translation; translating sentences consisting of verb+noun lexical collocations which were found specifically difficult for Turkish learners (Nişancı, 2014; Şen Bartan, 2019), and lastly, translating Turkish literary texts and listing and analysing verb+noun collocations used throughout the source and the target text (bilingual collocation lists). It is a quasi-experimental research design which uses the one-group pre-test-post-test only design (Creswell, 2014). The results of the study indicate that LCTT program has a positive effect on both students' awareness of lexical collocations and translation performance of verb+noun lexical collocations. Bu çalışmanın amacı çeviri öğretimi bağlamında açık sözcüksel eşdizim öğretimi için tasarlanan ve Çeviri için Sözcüksel Eşdizim Öğretimi (ÇSEÖ) adı verilen öğretim programının etkilerini incelemektir. ÇSEÖ programı İngilizce Mütercim Tercümanlık anabilim dalındaki öğrencilerine 10 hafta uygulanmıştır. Bu programda öntest, sontest, Compleatlextutor (http://lextutor.ca/concordancers/) adlı çevirimiçi bağımlı dizin aracını kullanarak verilen İngilizce edebi metinden eylem+ad eşdizimleri bulma, Türkçe-İngilizce çevirisi yapılmış bir romandan eylem+ad eşdizimleri eşleştirme ve çözümleme ve özellikle anadili Türkçe olan öğrenciler için zor bulunan eylem+adeşdizimleri içeren (Nişancı, 2014; Şen Bartan, 2019) tümcelerin Türkçe-İngilizce çevirilerinin yapılması, Türkçe-İngilizce yazınsal çeviriler yapıp iki dilli eşdizim listeleri çıkarma uygulamaları yer almaktadır. Çalışmada tek grup kontrol grupsuz öntest sontest deseni benimsenmiştir. (Creswell, 2014). Çalışmanın sonuçları ÇSEÖ programının öğrencilerin sözcüksel eşdizim farkındalıklarını ve çeviri edimlerini arttırdığını göstermektedir.

The last decade has witnessed a strong impact of emerging technologies on language pedagogy due to the developments in the computer technologies. The use of authentic linguistic examples through corpora and concordance based activities is defined as data-driven learning and it exposes the students to examples of more realistic language than invented or artificial examples. Therefore, this experimental study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the use of a concordance software and concordance lines as a pedagogical tool in vocabulary assessment at a state university in Turkey in 2015 academic year. The materials used in the study were specialized corpora, a concordance software and treatment handouts. The corpora were analyzed by means of AntConc 3.2.4w. An independent samples T-test, was conducted over the students’ GPAs, MANOVA and Standard Multiple Regression Analysis were conducted to see whether experimental and control groups were equivalent in terms of the knowledge of target vocabulary items. Thirdly, Independent Samples T-test for the three semi-controlled paragraph writing assessment and lastly descriptive statistics of the student questionnaire were administered. By the use of computer-generated concordances in the classroom, students explored regularities of patterning in L2. Corpus-based DDL is a great alternative since it emphasizes the exploration and discovery of learning process. By integrating technology into curricular programs, the lust of digital natives for hands-on learning is satisfied as well.
Key words: corpus-based approach; concordance lines; vocabulary instruction; data-driven learning.

This concordance study is of a corpus of applied
linguistics articles . It explores how and why accomplished academic writers use quotations and citations, and analyses the lexical and grammatical choices they make. The results of this analysis are discussed with reference to a number of possible
pedagogical applications.

The present study investigated how 6 Korean ESL graduate students in Canada used a suite of freely available reference resources, consisting of Web-based corpus tools, Google search engines, and dictionaries, for solving linguistic problems while completing an authentic academic writing assignment in English. Using a mixed methods design, the study examined the processes and outcomes of combined use of concordancers and other reference resources by the participants and their perceptions of the reference suite as a means of writing assistance. Results showed that while the reference suite served as an effective cognitive tool extending the cognitive powers of the participants in solving lexical and grammatical problems, the individual resources in the suite were each shown to have unique functions for which they were best suited, suggesting that concordancing may optimally be consulted in combination with other resources. However, some participants also experienced difficulties in using the tool stemming largely from the nature of their writing tasks and writing stages, and different goals and needs arising from them. This paper concludes by discussing theoretical and pedagogical implications of the findings.

In many educational institutions in Turkey, including universities, state schools, and private schools, a common problem in grammar teaching is the lack of authenticity due to the wide use of rule-based teaching. Consequently, some teachers prefer to adopt a deductive teaching approach with more explanation for grammar structures and less use of examples from various contexts. This case may sometimes end up with a traditional English lesson with mechanical exercises, as students call it, “Ali goes to cinema” kind of exercises, and it is not uncommon for students to complain about the frequency of encountering the same examples given on certain grammar topics, examples that often fail to be attuned with current real life situations, which obviously limits their productive skills by its failure to stimulate their ability to think of similar simple sentences. In order to overcome this, we propose a technique based on Data-Driven Language Learning with particular regard to corpus linguistics, and we consider the learner as research workers constructing their language themselves, and learning with less language description, hence they are expected to succeed in integrating meaning and form more. In this respect, the purpose of this article is to provide some insight into modern practices of teaching English language, and specifically to show a model lesson for grammar teaching from a critical perspective towards currently used English grammar books and textbooks. It will provide a brief and practical introduction to easily accessible concordances which can be utilized to assign the learner a constructive role by supplying him/her with input from real-life contexts, while touching on the principle of awareness with a few suggestions by using our data in our classes. It will also provide a brief outline of how online and offline programs can be easily adapted for grammar teaching and to generate authentic in-class materials.

A corpus is a collection of naturally-occurring texts that can be retrieved and analyzed to find out how language is used. In EFL classrooms, language corpora have been used to promote students‖ awareness of lexical behaviour, such as collocations and connotations. Despite its widespread use among practitioners in many instructional contexts to enhance students' learning, little attention has been paid to using concordance-based materials to improve collocations and semantic prosodies of Thai high school students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL). Thus, this paper first briefly reviews the significance of collocations and semantic prosodies for Thai high school students. It then analyzes situations of teaching and learning vocabularies in a Thai context and investigates how corpus materials can be utilized for improving students' vocabulary learning. Finally, it suggests how to use concordancing materials and Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to enhance collocations and semantic prosodies knowledge of the learners.

I ncreasingly, ESL teachers are asked to teach English for specific purposes (ESP) courses covering unfamiliar disciplinary domains for which there is no ESL textbook. This was our case when assigned to teach a graduate research writing course to PhD students in electrical engineering (EE). The students were preparing to coauthor book chapters with their EE advisor and eventually publish research articles in their respective areas of expertise. As instructors, we were unfamiliar with language conventions used in EE textbooks and were unable to locate an ESL textbook or adequate support in published ESP textbooks suited to the very advanced needs of these learners. We therefore decided to use authentic book chapters from the students' discipline to develop materials for class discussions and activities. To analyze rhetorical features, the class read and discussed different sections of the book chapters to determine how the authors organized and presented information. To focus on specific language features of the EE texts (e.g., grammatical, lexical, and discoursal), we developed some of the course materials using a computerized concordance program. Our materials and in-class discussions raised students' awareness of patterns of language commonly used in EE book chapters. We used a scanner, concordancing software, and book chapters obtained from the students' engineering advisor to prepare a variety of teaching materials to assist students in understanding and constructing texts conforming to EE genre and language conventions. The concordance-based activities further sparked students' own inquiries into effective language use. Procedure 1. Scan book chapters into a small corpus of computer readable texts. We scanned approximately 49,000 words from EE book chapters, noting the placement of any representational elements (e.g., formulas and performance graphs). 2. Develop research questions about language features that students want to explore, such as error patterns in writing or punctuation. An example of a research question we developed is related to collocational slot-and-filler patterns, or lexical phrases, (e.g., "a ____ of "). We were curious about what lexical items fill these slots. 3. Use a computer concordancing program to help answer questions. For example, we used MonoConc Pro (Version 2.0, 1999), which provided lexical, collocational, and grammatical frequency information about our corpus through a range of search capabilities. To follow the example in Step 2 above, we searched our minicorpus of EE book chapters for certain lexical phrases. We typed in "a * of " as the search string, which returned all phrases in the texts using this slot-and-filler pattern, from "a number of " to "a set of " (see Figure 1). 4. With the output from the concordance program, prepare handouts and activities for class discussions. Our concordance search on lexical patterns showed the actual lexical items that were used. The concordance software also calculated the frequency in percentages of each particular lexical phrase as filled by that particular lexical item. For example, of all three lexical phrases using the "a __ of " slot-and-filler pattern in our corpus, the word number filled the slot approximately 5% of the time (see Figure 2). Our materials then focused on presenting the frequency information of these productive phrases with examples of how they occurred in context. Figure 3 shows an excerpt of a student handout. By using texts taken directly from the students' specific field of study and by analyzing a variety of lexical, grammatical , and discoursal features of EE writing, teachers can enhance students' awareness of these language features. Furthermore, teachers can promote autonomous learning through student-generated inquiry into the language patterns used in their own disciplinary texts. By observing language patterns in genre-specific texts, students can gain Figure 1. Concordance output of "a * of" slot-and-filler pattern in electrical engineering texts. (From MonoConc Pro, Version 2.0 [Computer software], 1999, Houston, TX: Athelstan.

Back in the 1990s Malcolm Coulthard announced the beginnings of an emerging discipline, forensic linguistics, resulting from the interface of language, crime and the law. Today the courts are more than ever calling on language experts to help in certain types of cases, such as authorship identification, plagiarism, legal interpreting and translation, statement analysis, and voice identification. The application of new technologies to the analysis of questioned texts has greatly facilitated the work of the language scientist as expert witness in the legal setting, and contributed to the successful analysis and interpretation of style providing statistical and measurable data. This article aims at presenting linguists and researchers in forensic linguistics with an exploration of the strengths, limitations and challenges of state-of-the-art software for forensic authorship identification

We used TACT computer software to teach Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness to BA (Hons) students at the University of Luton in England. Conrad's novel is one of the texts used in the 'Language and New Literatures'modules (units). In these modules we combine analytical approaches to literary texts with linguistic methods. We used TACT to reinforce the understanding of the text of Heart of Darkness achieved through such a combination of methods. An exposure to the computer-based approaches to the text described in this article made the students' interaction with the text a more complex and rewarding experience.

El avance experimentado por las nuevas tecnologías ha provocado un cambio en la metodología de trabajo e incluso en las líneas de investigación recientes de muchos ámbitos del conocimiento. Las aportaciones de la informática al campo de la terminología han ...