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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy

BACKGROUNDT E XT-B A S E D AC T I V I T I E S
W
e have come to think of the computer as a
powerful tool for language learning in its
ability to access and deliver multimedia material
with the user in full control. Yet valuable learning
opportunities remain using technology that pre-
dates these multimedia capabilities. In the days be-
fore the graphical user interface (GUI) for com-
puter applications, when computers operated with
a fraction of the processing power common today,
text manipulation gave a glimmer of the possibili-
ties posed by computers for language learning.
Computers perf o rm simple, tedious tasks fast
and accurately, such as spell checking a paper,
counting words, finding a particular word or
w o rdstasks that tire the human brain but tax the
computer hardly at all. In fact, purely text-based
p rograms do things with text in a split second that
would take days for a human to accomplish.
CONCORDANCEINTRODUCTION
A
c o n c o rd a n c e is a list of occurrences of a specified
w o rd or phrase along with a piece of the pas-
sages where they occur from a large body of texts, or
c o r p u s. Any electronic text document in any lan-
guage could serve as a source of language to be
s e a rched, but a corpus, or c o r p o r a (plural), of suff i-
cient size and comprising a variety of authentic
texts, should aff o rd a re p resentative sample of usage.
The search itself works like the word Find
command in a word processor (Edit > Find), ex-
cept that a concordance displays in a list of their

Adapted from C o m p u t e r-assisted Language Learn i n g : A Practical Guide for Teachers, John de Szendeffy ( University of Michigan Press, 2004).
Fig. 1 A concordance of proud, the search term (or node), using a free online concordance engine. The list is sorted alphabetically by
the word following the search term, thereby grouping examples of uses: proud of + noun clause and proud + infinitive.
An MLL Primer

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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy
original sentence contexts all occurrences of the
search term within the corpus (see Fig. 1). A word
processor highlights or displays the search term in
the open document in serial fashionone occur-
rence at a time.
A concordance application can perform many
other functions, such as using elaborate search cri-
teria, sorting results, varying the length of the con-
text shown with the search term, making word or
frequency lists, comparing texts, and saving lists.
While concordance is widely used in linguistic
study and the study of usage for reference, few lan-
guage teachers have students use it in the class-
room. The obscurity of this tool is no measure of
its usefulness. Some activities that are as simple as
a Web search can provide examples of usage for
vocabulary, grammar, even punctuation.
ONLINE CONCORDANCE
software: Web browser
S
everal Web sites offer free concordance with es-
tablished corpora, though with fewer searching
and sorting parameters than a full concordance ap-
plication installed on your computer, where you
would also need a corpus file to search. They exist
in many languages and operate similarly. In
most searches, you enter your searc h
stringa word, idiom, or phrase, with or
without wildcard charactersand hit the
search button. We will use two online con-
cordance engines:
Edict Virtual Language Centre (VLC)
www.edict.com.hk/concordance
Collins Cobuild Concordance Sampler
titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/form.html
VLC has an easy-to-use concord a n c e
with options. The corpora, though small, are
in English, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
You choose the corpus to search. Some sin-
gle-author collections provide a rather limit-
ed source for the search term. You can ex-
pand the concordance to produce the entire
CON CO R DA N C E T E R M S
c o rp u s: a collection of texts, sometimes from a specific
s o u rce or field (e. g . , m e d i c a l , l i t e r a ry, British spoken) in
the form of a single computer- readable file or database.
corpora: plural of corpus or generally denoting many
texts from a variety of sources.
concatenate: link together into a chain, as individual
text files are concatenated to form a corpus.
collocate: place side-by-side; a collocation of a word
shows words appearing frequently near it.
K W I C ( key wo rd in context): a common option for display-
ing search results for text databases. For a concord a n c e,
the search term appears in the center of each line, i n
c o l o red or bold text, with the surrounding sentence
context to the right and left. The list can also be sort e d
by wo rds to the left or the right of the search term.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange): A common character set supported by
all computers, representing 128 English letters, num-
bers, and symbols. Any text editor can open an ASCII
text file, and most can save in this format (also called
text only), but its usually not their default format.
Corpora concatenate texts in ASCII format only.
wild card: a character in a search, often a question mark
(?) or asterisk (*), that represents an unknown (or
any) character.
Fig. 2 Setting parameters for a search with the VLC concordance. Select
whether the term is the whole word or a part or root, which corpus to
search, length of citation line, maximum number of concordances, and how to
sort the results (by the word to the left or right of the search term).
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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy
sentence or paragraph context for a term and see
its definition. Parameter settings for the search
(Fig. 2) include sorting by the word occurring be-
fore or after the search term, which tends to group
patterns in usage (see Fig. 1).
The Collins Cobuild Concordance Sampler
draws on a much larger corpus, 56 million words of
c o n t e m p o r a ry written and spoken English. It allows
for use of sophisticated t a g s to limit searches, for ex-
ample, to specific parts of speech, but the free sampler
version only re t u rns 40 lines, has a short citation line
of 70 characters, and does not link to the larger con-
text citation or dictionary definition as VLCd o e s .
STUDENT CONCORDANCE ACTIVITIES
Activity 1 Vocabulary on-demand
Students infer word meaning from the context, a
challenging proposition, but one facilitated by
multiple KWIC contexts and the option of seeing
the wider context of any term. Expand or adapt it
to focus on any lexical or grammatical item.
Give students several new vocabulary words or
phrases to look up (e.g., thwart, ecstatic, vast).
Pair words to be differentiated, such as franchise
and license in business English, or similar phrasal
verbs, such as run across, drop in, look up (as well as
the more common past tense forms).
Students enter each vocabulary item in the online
concordance, choose a corpus (that you recom-
mend), and search.
Based on the examples of contexts in the KWIC
list, students try to infer the meaning of each by
establishing patterns of its usage in many citations.
Double-click on the concordance word in any ci-
tation in the KWIC list to get a larger context.
Students write each new item in an original sentence.
In pairs or groups, they compare each others def-
initions and usage or use an online dictionary
(right) to confirm their definitions.
Activity 2 Count/non-count nouns
This activity gives students practice in differentiat-
ing count from non-count nouns in context.
Give students a list of nouns to concordance (e.g.,
help, jewelry, honesty, advice, equipment).
Using Collins, add a part of speech tag to limit re-
sults to nouns, e.g., help/NOUN. Other POS tags
include /VERB and /JJ (adjective).
Search for a or an to see how many count nouns
followalso shows which initial vowel sounds
take a vs. an.
Students concordance each one, sorting the
KWIC list (excerpt below) by the word preced-
ing the search term, which will group some and
and make the patterns more apparent.
They try to determine from the citations whether
a noun is count or not. They can see that the
noun form does not appear with a final s.
They verify their answers with a partner.
US I N G W I L D C A R D S I N S E A R C H E S
W i l d c a rds stand in for any other character and return a
c o n c o rdance of multiple forms of a wo rd . For example,
b i g * , w h e re the asterisk re p resents our wildcard ,
could return concordance citations with b i g , b i g g e r ,
b i g g e s t , b i go t , and other wo rds beginning with b i g .
The VLC concordance enables a similar function with
a parameter setting instead of wildcards (below).
Wildcards are also useful in providing examples of
words formed with the same prefix, such as dis*,
un*, in*, mis*, etc. Focus on dis- in adjectives, for
example, with dis*ed.
For these activities, use VLC first. If it pro-
duces too few concordances, use Collins.
From the Longman Web Dictionary, www.longmanwebdict.com
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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy
Activity 3 Collocations
Search for words that frequently occur with parti-
cles in a given meaning. A search for interested,
for example, will result in a concordance showing
this words collocation with the particle in, giv-
ing repeated examples of its use in various contexts.
Create a cloze exercise with the particles that col-
locate with vocabulary items missing.
Some particles should collocate for one definition
while their absence indicates another, so for a
more challenging exercise, some blanks in the
cloze may not need to be filled in, depending on
the context and meaning. For example,
I believe ______ Jim took it. (no particle needed)
I believe ______ re i n c a rnation. (i n collocates with believe)
Students create a concordance for each term and de-
t e rmine the correct particle from the examples, not-
ing that the particle may not collocate in all usages.
Activity 4 Reference for correcting papers
Usage or collocation mistakes in student writing
can be identified by the teacher with notation for
the student to concordance that term to discover
its correct use. By using a concordance to see nu-
merous authentic examples then struggling to infer
the meaning, students assume responsibility for
correcting their mistakes and may discover the log-
ic behind the usage with many more examples than
most textbooks provide.
Consider the common confusion over the past
and present participle and their roles, respectively,
describing an experience versus the cause of it:
I was boring in class. I am interesting in Cuba.
The speaker was bored. It was an interested film
A concordance of bored will also display the verb
form in addition to the adjective:
The teacher bored us
as well as other meanings of the verb form alto-
gether:
The bit bored through the rock
So students will need guidance interpreting a con-
cordance and knowing which usages to look for.
Activity 5 Identifying use of punctuation
Conduct a concordance of punctuation marks to
identify their various uses, especially, less common-
ly used ones like the colon and semicolon. Using a
good variety of corpora, students should see usage
of the colon, for example, to introduce lists or state-
ments, re p resent a ratio or time, and identify bibli-
cal verse. (Add a space after the colon in the searc h
to eliminate ratios, biblical or time citations.)
In pairs, students concordance for a colon (:).
Where does it occur?
What are the patterns?
Is it used with numbers and words?
What uses did your partner find?
The citations also show proper typography:
There is no space before the colon in prose
but after.
Activity 6 Distinguishing semantic diff e re n c e s
ESL students have difficulty determining usage of
words of similar meaning, such as fix, repair, or
mend. In what context is each used?
Perform a concordance for each of these terms.
Sort the results by the word after the search term
to group what we fix, repair, or mend.
Students write three lists: things that are fixed, things
that are re p a i red, and things that are mended.
With a partner, they try to establish patterns of
usage.
LEARNERS CORPUS
The Longman Learners Corpus is a 10 million word
database of writing entirely by ESL students from
every nationality and language. The writing is coded by
level and L1 and provides insight into patterns of prob-
lems of each group, which is used in writing dictionar-
ies, such as the Longman Active Study Dictionary, as
well as other materials for English learners.
You can contribute your students writing to this cor-
pus. For details, go to
www.longman.com/dictionaries/corpus/lclearn.html.
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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy
Activity 7 Material preparation
Examples for answers. For questions about
grammar or vocabulary usage that require exam-
ples to illuminate, a concordance can quickly pres-
ent a variety of contexts that the teacher can point
to as examples of the rule.
Authentic examples. Teachers can concordance
vocabulary or grammar items to generate authen-
tic examples of use for material or quiz prepara-
tion. Lines of citations can be copied and pasted
into a word processor.
Most concordances, using KWIC citations by
default, display n characters to the left of the search
term and n characters to the right (a number that
can be varied in some concordances), regardless of
where the sentence begins. To get full-sentence
examples instead of fragments, ones that can be
copied and pasted into a word processor, switch to
a view of the larger context, such as the entire sen-
tence where the item occurs or use the greatest line
width (60 on VLC, below). Create a cloze as de-
sired, such as by remov-
ing the search term or
collocation item.
OTHER WEB RESOURCES FOR LAN-
GUAGE CONTEXTS
level: high-intermediate to advanced
software: Web browser
I
n addition to using online concordance, students
and teachers can find contexts for vocabulary on
specific Web sites or by using a Web search engine
(such as Google or Yahoo). While this method
identifies the source of the usage directly, it cant
sort the results like a concordance KWIC list.
LexisNexis
This massive database of news and other published
business, legal, and medical reports can produce
KWIC lists of search terms. Use the Quick News
Search (below) or Guided News Search function
to enter a word or phrase. With the Guided New
S e a rch, you can access articles in English, Dutch,
F rench, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
View the Lexis/Nexis search results in the E x p a n d-
ed List f o rmat (below), which displays one art i c l e
at a time with excerpted passages where the searc h
t e rmoccurs, with the term in bold.
For detailed instructions, see MLL primer on us-
ing LexisNexis.
www.bu.edu/celop/mll/tutorials
News search engines
If students dont have access to LexisNexis, several
news search engines can search free online news
sources for the occurrence of a search term. The
popular search engine Google has one with thou-
sands of sources around
the world for news
( n e w s . g o o g l e . c o m ) .
Google News returns the
search term in bold in a KWIC list with a link to
each news item and is available in several country
version in the local language (see Fig. 3, next page).
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Concordance for Vocabulary and Usage | John de Szendeffy
General Web search
S e a rching for a vocabulary term with a We b
s e a rch engine will re t u rn links to p a g e s t h a t
contain that term, not the terms themselves in
citations. You would then have to follow a link
that looked promising and conduct a find op-
eration (Edit > Find) in the browser to locate
the term on that page.
In other words, the Web search engine
gives you l i n k s to pages that contain the term ,
but no further help in identifying the term or
indicating how many times its used. While
such a search would likely turn up the searc h
t e rm in a page, considering the lack of contro l
over the context (what page it turns up on) and the
limited occurrences (perhaps one per Web page),
the other methods described above might be more
f ruitful for the time spent.
NewReader
NewReader is a popular text manipulation pro g r a m
for the Mac (Classic) that creates many diff e rent ex-
e rcises from a given text, including grammar clozes.
(See Fig. 5, above.)
Fig. 3 Google News search results with the search term in
bold in the article headline or synopsis.
Fig. 5 Grammar search cloze (logical connectors) in NewReader.
Web References
Online concord a n c e
Edict Vi rtual Language Centre.
w w w. e d i c t . c o m . h k / c o n c o rd a n c e .
Collins Cobuild Concordance and Collo-
cation Sampler.
t i t a n i a . c o b u i l d . c o l l i n s . c o . u k / w b i n f o . a s p
c o r p u s .
T.S. Eliot poetry
w w w. m i s s o u r i . e d u / ~ t s e l i s t / t s e . h t m l
William Blake poetry
w w w. e n g l i s h . u g a . e d u / B l a k e _ C o n c o r-
d a n c e
B i b l e
b i b l e . g o s p e l c o m . n e t
Classic Reader
w w w. c l a s s i c re a d e r. c o m
P a p e r s
Catherine N. Ball Tutorial: Concor-
dances and Corpora,
w w w. g e o rg e t o w n . e d u / f a c u l t y / b a l l c / c o r
p o r a / t u t o r i a l . h t m l
Using concordance programs in the
m o d e rn foreign languages classro o m ,
I C T 4 LT Module 2.4. Information and
Communications Technology for Lan-
guage Te a c h e r s .
w w w. i c t 4 l t . o rg / e n / e n _ m o d 2 - 4 . h t m
Dyck, Garry N. Concordancing for English
Language Teachers, paper, TESL Mani-
toba, February 15, 1999.
home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~gdyck/conc.html
Tim Johns Data-driven Learning Page.
w e b . b h a m . a c . u k / j o h n s t f / t i m c o n c . h t m
Stevens, Vance, Concordance and colloca-
tion re s o u rc e s .
w w w.geocities.com/Athens/ Olym-
p u s / 4 6 3 1 / t e x t a n a l . h t m
F ree software
C o n c o rdance, Jean-Daniel Fekete
(PC/Mac program, fre e ) .
w w w. l r i . f r / ~ f e k e t e / c o n c o rd a n c e
Fig. 4 Google general Web search results with the search term in
bold in the Web page title or synopsis. There may only be one occur-
rence of the word on the actual page, so this result synopsis is actual-
ly more useful than going to the page.