SKBP 1023

Good day everyone. Well this is my last posting for the course. For this last task, we were required to discuss on the article “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordances to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad page 70 in OTL book. I’m partnered with the same person as last time, Nurul Husna Ibrahim.

This article emphasizes the significant of concordance and the advantages of using this software in analyzing language data, on how words and grammatical construction are used. The software has totally proves that it gives a lot of worth towards the teachers, researchers and even language learners in examining the concordance lines.

EMAS Corpus which was used in the study collected in 2002, consists of close to half a million words. It is an untagged and unedited learner corpus that contains written data in the form of three essays written by about 800 students which comprises of year 5, form 1 and form 4. The topics were based on the amount of language the topic could elicit. As such, topics and tasks were selected because students were expected to be able to write more because of their familiarity with the task and topic.

Various methods can be used to determine language development. A basic assumption made in this article is that developmental patterns can be implied by comparing the language use of three different age groups. In this article, developmental patterns are examined by studying the language productivity, range of vocabulary and sophistication vocabulary of the students.

Productivity in this article is indicated by the number of sentences per essay in the words per sentence. The productivity of the three age groups is compared in order to examine language development. As for the range of the vocabulary, the diversity of the vocabulary used in a corpus is often determined by calculating the type to token the ration (Schmitt, 2002). Specialized software such as RANGE are used in determining the sophistication of the vocabulary.

Therefore, although concordance software can be used to help analyze the language data available, many may still be easily be disturbed by the huge amount of data available. This article has attempted to present the relevant of corpus data in investigating language development without having to analyze concordance lines. The values in this study, thus, can be regarded as benchmarks against which to compare future groups of students as well as assess the development of the language program.

Applications of concordance in: literary work and linguistic

Suppose you are required to search a word in a particular poem within a limited of time. Of course you wouldn’t have the time to search for the exact word in the poem especially when the poem is too long and have many words that will make you even more confusing. So, therefore, Concordance is the best solution in solving this matter.

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. For instance, if you look up the word of “ABROAD” in the poem Lyrical Ballads (Bristol, 1798) written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, you will find:

ABROAD..............3

   There's neither horse nor man abroad,       Idiot Boy

   "There's not a single soul abroad."         Idiot Boy

   And who is she, be-times abroad,            Idiot Boy

A concordance doesn’t do your thinking or investigating for you, any more than a computer does. You have to ask the right questions, you have to follow up your own hunches and insights. A concordance is a matchless tool for investigating texts. Its power is limited only by its user’s imagination.

A computer concordance can now be prepared relatively easily provided a suitable e-text is available. However, in practice a good deal of editorial work is required in the early stages if a reliable concordance is wanted, and to produce a concordance of a quality suitable for publication in book form is generally reckoned to take around 2000 hours.

REFERENCES:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english.

Hello again. For this week’s task, I was required to do the online quiz based on the understandings of the basic level in ICT. At first, I was totally excited and eager to answer it because I know that my knowledge in it are good even though not that kind of expert, but my understandings in ICT are not quite bad. So I thought,” This must be such an easy questions for me. Simple as ABC”. Unluckily, as I started to do the questions, I was quite shocked for a second. All the questions were not in the English form as I thought before but in the MALAY language! “I’m dead”, I said. I was a bit disappointed and frustrated. But then again, I thought quickly,” Why shouldn’t I give it a try rather than just complaining it?”. And so, I continued doing it. As I go through the questions, almost of the words used were quite unfamiliar to me. Like ‘alat kelui’ which means handphone, ‘hamparan elektronik’ as Spreedsheet, ‘cakera liut’ which means diskette,etc. I giggled when I heard the words for the first time in my life. And to some extent, it really did confuse me for a while when trying to answer it.  “What on earth is this question trying to ask”, I would sighed. But overall, I found it interesting and quite challenging doing it. It was really fun after all. Finally, I ended the quiz and scored the following below:

Well that was just about the experience, but personally I found the test is somehow encouraging though. The quiz appears to motivate one to have fully grasp on the components of a basic computer, thus creating deep awareness on the understanding itself. Besides, the quiz itself also works as a user-friendly kind of way. This is because, the participants can leave the question for a while if they don’t know or unsure about the answer. And then come back to it later to answer it. Doing the online quiz is like taking an open book test where you can search for the particular information of question while doing it. You can also receive immediate feedback after doing it. You’ll get the result at that time after entering your password.

Therefore, for me, doing the online quiz gives me a wonderful experience. It’s enjoyable and fun answering it. (^_^)