5th academic post! Concordancing for Language Learning?

When you think of a concordance, what do you think of? I immediately envision boring, dry tomes that need a concordance because the words in the said tomes aren't generally used in day-to-day conversations now, therefore we need the concordance to grasp the context of the words. Examples: the Bible and Shakespearian works.

Before I go into my personal opinion of concordances and its benefits (or lack thereof), let me summarise the article i read in order to fully understand what concordancing is.

First up is Concordancing in Language Learning by John Flowerdew. He states that 'error analysis and correction' is a good way for learners to begin using concordances, as it gives learners specific words to search for, and simultaneously they can also see the (if any) differences between the way they use their language and the way the concordance does. One of the easiest ways to learn language through concordancing is to practice serendipity learning - allowing learners to use the concordancer as and when they wish, for whatever purpose they wish. Easiness aside, there are also benefits that can be reaped from the serendipity method such as:

i) learners are autonomous and responsible for their own learning,
ii) searches are learner-initiated, therefore the results will be tailored to the learner's needs, and
iii) researching a language this way will make learners develop an overall awareness of the language.

Inductive learning uses the application of inductive and deductive reasoning. For example, if a teacher presents material, and explains it using a concordance, then it is a deductive approach. HOwever, if the learner is told to research about the material using a concordance, it is then an inductive approach to learning. Serendipity learning, for instance, is inductive learning. This method of learning makes it possible for students to access the concordance to answer specific questions. Hence, learners become researchers, because they initiate the search question and look for the answers by themselves.

A few writers have suggested a use like the one described, for example Pickard (1993) has described an EAP course called 'Learning from Expert Writers' in which learners are trained to use the concordance independantly as a tool to improve their writing. Ma (1993) has also described a similar situation which encourages learners to use a concordancer and access a corpus to enhance their writing.

Both applications are in sync with a suggestion made by Levy (1990) for the concordancer to be available online so that it is possible to access a dictionary, spellchecker, thesaurus and grammar-checker. According to Levy, learners may use the concordancer in the following ways:

i) checking meaning
ii) checking general syntax
iii) checking usage
iv) exploring special lexis especially ESP vocabulary
v) checking derived forms
vi) checking collocates of words
vii) exploring set pieces; eg: phrases, cliches

And that's pretty much all from Flowerdew's article!

In my personal opinion, concordancers are very useful in language learning because it is very important to know how to use a word in certain contexts and the concordancer helps you - and very clearly too - by listing down a particular word in all the sentences it appears in. This makes it easy to study and learn, one word at a time.

I'm not a teacher, but I can imagine that teaching would also be somewhat easier. Instead of having to think up contexts in which a particular word can be used, one can check it out with the help of a concordancer! And it is also (i think) easier to teach students - instead of having to drill all the rules and possible uses of each word, it is much much easier for students to understand (and therefore, for teachers to teach) when there are examples for them to look at and understand.

There, those are my two cents worth. I hope I sort of make sense!