FOURTH POSTING - CONCORDANCE

Hi everybody. How you all doing? This is my fourth posting on this week and wish to welcome all of you again to my blogger. On this week, my lecture has given the fourth task. Regarding it I need to discuss an article with my partner which is about “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” from our OTL book by Arshad Abdul Samad from University Putra Malaysia.


I need to do this assignment with one of my partner and I was done it with Allimalar. The article is about and mainly discuss about the importance of concordance. Besides that it too discuss about the benefits using software’s such as Wordsmith and Microconcord which help us in analyzing language specifically words and grammatical order which is useful for students and teachers. Concordance is software that is used to make a concordance. The listing of certain words in a row means concordance in our opinion. Concordance makes it easier for us because it will only list down the words that we want in an alphabetical order. In addition, the words can be seen clearly without any complications.

According to Schmitt (2002:34), using a corpus in language learning language captures students in a whole new way instead of making them just memorizing rules of English, as what it has been done all this while. Many studies have been done regarding concordance and how it helps but the one that is discussed in detail in this chapter is English of Malaysian School Students (EMAS) corpus, which was investigated by researchers from University Putra Malaysia (UPM), on language development using language production and lexical variety. EMAS corpus was collected in 2002 and it consists of almost half a million words in the form essays written by 800 students from year 5, form 1 and form 4. Topics that were selected were based on the amount of language certain topics could take. This is why narration topics were taken because students were expected to write better based on the things that they were familiar.

Now I’m going to discuss about concordance more deeply. Concordancer is software that is used to make a concordance. In my opinion, concordance is the listing of certain words in a row. Concordance makes it easier for us because it will only list down the words that we want in an alphabetical order and the words can be seen clearly. If we look by the side of language learning, there are numerous articles regarding to the subject of concordance. We can understand concordance and the application of it easily if an article constructed in simple English. But if the article is constructed in complicated English then difficult to understand concordance and the application of it. Concordance is something that is best to be mastered by students especially language students due to the fact that Concordancer can provide many answers regarding the usage of any language. Here I can say that Language play main role in the application of concordance. Serve it to know more : http://www.bhashaindia.com/Patrons/LanguageTech/Textanalysis.aspx

Now I’m going to give a brief explanation regarding content analysis. Regarding to my search content analysis is known as textual analysis. Content analysis is divided into two forms, which is conceptual analysis and relational analysis. Conceptual analysis shows the number of words that is occurred within a text and then gets it recorded. The text should be coded or break down into convenient content categories. Relational analysis builds on conceptual analysis by groping the relationships among concepts in a text. In the process of identifying the words or phrases, the main step that should take is to see which word is analyzed and how the word is used in the particular text. Content analysis focuses on the basic form of certain words. Relationship between words and concepts are looked into profundity, as in how does a word acts in the particular phrase. There are few steps in the content analysis. The first thing that you should be doing is to describe the area that need to be studies, secondly select the media that will be used for the data either relational analysis or conditional analysis. Thirdly, choose the category and then count either the presence or absence of the particular category and after that places them accordingly into one category. Content analysis is very good way to analyze words, phrases or even sentences. There is a link to let you know more about it :

http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/socio/kuechler/341/f95/caho.html