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What is concordance?

A concordance is, according to webmaster's collegiate Dictionary (10th ed), an alphabetical index of the principal words in a book or the word of author with their immediate contents. Then concordances is a piece of software , either installed on a computer or accessed through a website, which can be used to search , access and analyses language from a corpus. It allows us to search a word or phrases for multiple examples of how that word or phrase is used in every text or speech.

What is concordance used for?

*Publish to web

*Creating indexes and word list

*Find phrase and idioms

*Comparing different usages of the same word

*Analyzing keywords

* Analyzing word frequencies

Benefit of concordance to language learners and teachers.

Concordance is very useful to language teachers. By using this software, they can use it as teaching materials for students in the classroom. The benefit of concordance to students is to understand differences uses or meaning of certain words. Certain words have a multiple meanings, so, by using concordance, teachers can take example sentences from a corpus and get the student to group of sentences according to their meaning. For examples, if the students have difficulty with distinctions of meaning between modal, can and could, they can define the meaning using the concordance software. It really helps teachers as well as students to distinguish the right meaning of some words. Next, concordance also helps students to identify their own errors. If students make a collocation error, instead of correcting them by their self, teachers can ask them to put the route word into the concordances software and see if the students can define their own errors. Teachers can get their students to use concordance to find and record their new words or phrases by the words have being used in concordance. If the teachers teach a specific use of a word or phrase, teachers could get the student to make sure the examples that their find matches the use that teacher have taught.

For the language learners, they can use concordance to:-

~ Checking meaning

~ Checking general syntax usage

~ Exploring special lexis

~ Checking derived forms

~ Checking collocates of words
~ Exploring set pieces e.g. phrasal verbs, clichés

Concordance can be a guide line to analysis error and do correction. They can indicate errors in their own writing which can be investigated and corrected by many of concordance. It gives learners specific languages items to investigate and at the same time allows them to work out how their use of languages differs from that of the concordance. Other than that, language learner can use concordance as serendipity learning. Learners can use it as the ways to browse down the word frequently list which must concordances provide.

It looks like browsing the pages of a dictionary. Serendipity learning also gives others benefits such as:

· Learners can truly autonomous and responsible for their own learning

· Can be guaranteed that the learning corresponds to learner needs because searches are leaner-initiated.

· Develop overall language awareness.

Sources:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/concordancers-elt

http://www.ecml.at/projects/Voll/our_resources/graz_2001/authentic/concordancers/menu_concordancers.htm#What