Concord Applied Languages

8/6/2019 Concord Applied Languages

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Contents

y Aimsy Authors of this moduley Introduction by Graham Daviesy 1. What are concordances and how can they help language teachers?y 2. Concordance software and corporay 3. How does the use of concordances fit in with language teaching methodologies?y 4. Some practical illustrationsy 5. Preparing yourself and your students for working with concordancersy 6. The future of concordancing in the classroomy Bibliography and referencesy Websitesy Feedback and blog

Aims

The aim of this module is to introduce language teachers to the use of concordances and concordance programs in theModern Foreign Languages classroom. Concordancing is part ofCorpus Linguistics, which is dealt with by TonyMcEnery & Andrew Wilson in Module 3.4. Section 2.2 of this module includes a brief introduction to corpus linguistics.

Authors of this module

Marie-Nolle Lamy, Open University, UK.

Hans Jrgen Klarskov Mortensen, Vordingborg Gymnasium, Denmark.

With an introduction by Graham Davies, Editor-in-Chief, ICT4LT Website.

Introduction by Graham Davies

A concordance, according to the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987), is:

An alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and oftenhow it is used.


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I first came across the term concordance from one of the lecturers who taught me at universityduring the early 1960s. He had produced a concordance of the complete works of Stefan Georgemanually and without the help of a computer. It was a massive and laborious task, during thecourse of which a good deal was revealed about the writers use of language, and it gained thelecturer a PhD. Nowadays such an undertaking would not qualify for the award of a doctorate

because a computer can do the job in a matter of hours or - even minutes.

I was introduced to concordancing programs - concordancers for short - in the late 1970s,initially using COCOA and OCP, both of which ran on mainframe computers. In the early 1980sI wrote my own concordance program in BASIC on a Prime minicomputer and used it withlanguage students at Ealing College of Higher Education in connection with my classes on textanalysis. A version of this concordancer was also incorporated into the 1985 BBC Micro versionofFun with Texts and adapted for the 1992 DOS version by Marco Bruzzone.

Nowadays I often use a concordancer to check my own writing style. It picks up my over-frequent use of certain words, and it is particularly helpful when used in conjunction with athesaurus. A thesaurus never gives you enough authentic examples of usage to tell you how touse a word with which you are unfamiliar, but a concordancer does - providing you have adecent corpus of authentic texts: see Activity 12 in Section 4.

Concordancers are used extensively these days for creating glossaries and dictionaries, and theyare extremely valuable tools for the language teacher. Curiously, they tend to be used rarely byteachers of Modern Foreign Languages in the UK but are well established in the EFL professionworldwide. Lets hope that this module will make a few converts.

Tim Johns was one of the first language teachers to make use of concordancers in the languagesclassroom Back in the early 1980s Johns began to make use of the concordancers available onthe big mainframe computers at the University ofBirmingham. He then wrote a concordance

program that ran on one of the first popular microcomputers, the Sinclair ZX81: see Higgins &Johns (1984:88-93). Johns later developed the concept ofData Driven Learning (DDL):see Johns (1991). DDL is an approach to language learning whereby the learner gains insightsinto the language that he/she is learning by using concordance programs to locate authenticexamples of language in use, i.e. what this module is all about. In DDL the learning process is nolonger based solely on the teacher's initiative, his/her choice of topics and materials and theexplicit teaching of rules, but on the learner's own discovery of rules, principles and patterns ofusage in the foreign language. In other words, learning is driven by authentic language data.Johns wrote one of the first commercially available classroom concordancers, MicroConcord,which was published by Oxford University Press. Murison-Bowie (1993), the author ofthe MicroConcordManual, gives some very persuasive reasons for using a concordancer:

Whether one opts for putting up a case, or for knocking one down, any search using [a concordancer] is given a clearerfocus if one starts out with a problem in mind, and some, however provisional, answer to it. You may decide that youranswer was basically right, and that none of the exceptions is interesting enough to warrant a re -formulation of your

answer. On the other hand, you may decide to tag on a bit to the answer, or abandon the answer completely and to take acloser look. Whichever you decide, it will frequently be the case that you will want to formulate another question, whichwill start you off down a winding road to who knows where. ( Murison-Bowie (1993:46), cited in Rzeau (2001:153)

Rzeau writes:

It is precisely this "winding road", along which one may come across serendipity learning, which give concordances acertain appeal. In addition, once you have started relying on the evidence of the data for checking the "rules" found ingrammar-books as well as your own "intuitions" about language, concordances tend to become an indispensable tool. It ishoped that the rationale and examples given in this chapter will have convinced its readers to take a trip to the country ofconcordancers to observe "the company that words keep" (Firth 1957:187), cited in Rzeau (2001:154)


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A memorable phrase: "the company that words keep". It's what we have been teaching language learners to be aware of formany, many years. Now technology makes it easier.

The remainder of this module has been written by Marie-Nolle Lamy and Hans JrgenKlarskov Mortensen. Over to them

1. What are concordances and how can they help language

teachers?

Contents of Section 1

y 1.1 A basic manual concordancey 1.2 A computer-generated concordancey 1.3 A parallel concordancey 1.4 List of uses of concordancing for language teachersy 1.5 Learning task

1.1A basic manual concordance

What is a concordance? The simplest way to answer this is to look at some English ones to beginwith. For instance here is a concordance for the word "sin", prepared manually, and shown withthe text from which the four separate occurrences of this word are taken.

Concordance 1 on the word "sin":

1. Thus from my lips, byyours, my

Sin is purged.

2. Then have my lips the Sin that they have took.

3. Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetlyurged!

4. Give me my Sin again.

Text used as basis for the concordance, with the keyword in bold:

JULIETAy, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.JULIETSaints do not move, though grant for prayers sake.ROMEOThen move not, while my prayers effect I take.Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.


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JULIETThen have my lips the sin that they have took.ROMEO

Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!Give me my sin again.

So a concordance is a list of words (called keywords, e.g. here "sin"), taken from a piece of

authentic language (corpus, e.g. hereRomeo and Juliet), displayed in the centre of the page andshown with parts of the contexts in which they occur (here maximum 29 characters to the left ofthe keyword and to the right). This is also known as a Key Words In Context concordance ora KWIC concordance.

1.2Acomputer-generated concordance

Now look at that same concordance, displayed with fuller context (here between 75 and 80characters each side, including blank spaces):

1. move not, while my prayers effect I take. Thus from my lips, byyours, my sin is purged.JULIET Then have my lips the sin that they have took. ROMEO

2. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged. JULIET Then havemy lips the sin that they have took. ROMEO Sin from thy lips? Otrespass sweetly urged!

3. is purged. JULIET Then have my lips the sin that they havetook. ROMEO Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give memy sin again

4. they have took. ROMEO Sinfrom thy lips? O trespass sweetlyurged! Give me my sin again.

The KWIC and the fuller context display are both useful, depending on what you want to do withthe material.

So there you have the basic ingredients for any concordance: a text base and a procedure. Butwhereas the procedure was manual and it gave us an extremely limited concordance (theconcordance had only fourcitations), the meanings of the word "sin" that appear in it are rootedin the poetic world of Romeo and Juliet. Below, in contrast, is a concordance on the samekeyword, based this time on a 25-citation sample created by a concordancer, using contemporaryincluding British and American books, ephemera, newspapers, magazines, radio transcripts andtranscriptions of ordinary conversations.

Concordance 2 on the word "sin":

1. said cohabiting was no longer a sin . Serbs free last six

2. daily care of others was the ultimate sin . We arranged for Ted to spend a

3. remarkable. Shaws rendition was a sin against culture, an insult to Eliot

4. them that God wants them to turn from sin and transform their lives. Women

5. the ascendancy to and loss of power; sin and redemption; self-doubt and


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6. to prove that all that a life of sex, sin and St Tropez sun brings iswrinkles

7. taken seriously. Julians account of sin and forgiveness stands unexcelled

8. deepening anxiety over the question of sin and evil, she took it up. Carolly

9. can spring as much from a sense of sin as from sanctity. That, thankGod,

10. Roebuck was dismissed to the sin bin for10 minutes for his part in11. is pride, covetousness, deceit and sin , but say youll accept adultery

and

12. is like Sodom and Gomorrah -you know, Sin City. So the very wordYoungstown

13. of rubber safety bumpers, as ugly as sin . Few mourned its passing. [p]That

14. White.26 He finds the earthly ideas of sin , guilt, punishment, good and evil

15. BERLIN CABARET NOW Decadence,satire,

sin bohemian excess Once

16. sumptuous food shops. with a sense of sin , I bought some on NevskyProspekt

17. to mine without a tumble. The only sin Ive committed is not having you

18. sin of all: I have heard of a certain sin . I thank God that I do not knowof

19. cannot announce Gods forgiveness of sin in the Absolution and cannot

20. It was during the Reformation that sin in Scotland really got going. Any

21.sin is prevalent. Although this sin is a comment on all of mankind, it

22. sounds a bit stage-ethnic: `The only sin is to believe that happiness is gone

23. insisting on the concept of original sin . It would take on a kind of

24. bed the selfsame one! More primal than sin itself, this fell to me. [f]

25. do nothing to deal with her problem of sin . Joni was disturbed by Carls

In contrast to the Shakespeare concordance in which the original lines from the play were shortenough to fit entirely within the display, here the left and right are chopped off, in this case to 38maximum characters including blank spaces, a number which in many concordancers can beadjusted to give a less disorienting look to the citations. We will see in Section 5 how important(and also how contentious) the issue of doctoring the results of a search is.

1.3A parallel concordance

First, for those teachers who like to work with both the target language and the mother tongue,we will say a few words about bilingual or multilingual concordances, also known as parallelconcordances. Imagine a novel in Language A and a translation of that text in Language B. Or,in a European context, think of an official document translated into all the languages of the EU.Suppose you want to study how a French word like the preposition "pour" is phrased in different

parts of the original texts. Using normal concordancing techniques, the program is able to find alloccurrences ofpourin French, also identifying the paragraphs and sentences in which those


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instances occur - e.g. sentence 3 in paragraph 2, sentence 4 in paragraph 3, and so on. Then theparallel concordancer finds the equivalent sentences in the translated text. Preparation of thecorpus for use with parallel concordancers has to be meticulous. The two (or more) texts musthave been aligned in advance paragraph by paragraph, so that paragraph 3 in one language isequivalent to paragraph 3 in the other (but not sentence by sentence, as we know that translatorsmay well render one sentence by two, or two sentences by one, and so on). Here is an exampleshowing how "pour" relates to various structures in English

A parallel French-English concordance on "pour" using an extract from Le Petit Prince by

Antoine de Saint Exupry

Original text Translation

1. Ainsi, quand ilaperutPOURla

premire fois mon avion [...]1. The first time he saw my aeroplane,for instance [...]

2. Alors elle avait forc satouxPOUR lui infliger quand mme

des remords.

2. Then she forced her cough a littlemore SO THAT he should sufferfrom remorse just the same.

3. -Approche-toi que je te voie mieux,

lui ditle roi qui tait tout fier dtreenfin roiPOUR quelquun.

3. Approach, so that I may see you

better, said the king, who feltconsumingly proud of being at last aking OVERsomebody.

4. Car,POURles vaniteux, les autres

hommes sont des admirateurs.4. For, TO conceited men, all othermen are admirers.

5. Cest commePOUR la fleur. 5. It is just as it is WITH the flower.

6. Cest doncPOUR a encore que

ai achet une bote de couleurs et

des crayons.

6. It is FOR THAT PURPOSE,again, that I have bought a box of

paints and some pencils.

7. Cestle mme paysage que celui de

la

pa

ge prcdente, ma

is jel

a

idessin une fois encorePOUR bien

vous le montrer.

7. It is the same as that on page 90,

but I have drawn it again TO impressit on your memory.

8. Elle ferait semblant de

mourirPOUR chapperau ridicule.8. She would [...] pretend that she wasdying, TO avoid being laughed at.

9. et ctait bien

commodePOURfaire chaufferle

djeuner du matin

9. and they were veryconvenient FORheating his breakfastin the morning.,

10. Ilcommena donc parles

visiterPOURy chercher une

occupation etPOURsinstruire.

10. He began therefore, by visitingthem, IN ORDER TO add to hisknowledge.

11. Ilme fallutlongtempsPOUR comprendre do il

venait.

11. It took me a long time TO learnwhere he came from.

12. Javais le reste du jourPOUR me

reposer, etle reste de la

nuitPOURdormir...

12. I had the rest of theday FORrelaxation and the rest ofthe night FORsleep.

13.POUR toi je ne suis quun renardsemblable cent mille renards

13. TO you, I am nothing more than afox like a hundred thousand otherfoxes


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See St John (2003).

Multiconcordis an example of a multilingual parallel concordancer. It is the result of workundertaken at the University ofBirmingham as a contribution to an EC-funded Lingua project,coordinated by Francine Roussel, Universit de Nancy II, to develop a parallel concordancer for

classroom use. Programmed by David Woolls, with Birmingham University support from PhilipKing and Tim Johns.

1.4 List ofuses ofconcordancing for language teachers

y How can concordances help teachers of languages? We will go into much greater detailin Section 4, Some practical illustrations, but here we can summarise the uses ofconcordancers as follows:

y The teacher can use a concordancer to find examples of authentic usage to demonstratefeatures of vocabulary, typical collocations, a point of grammar or even the structure of atext

y The teacher can generate exercises based on examples drawn from a variety of corpora,for example gap-filling exercises and tests.

y Students can work out rules of grammar or usage and lexical features for themselves bysearching for key words in context. Depending on their level, they can be invited toquestion some of the rules, based on their observation of patterns in authentic language.

y Students can be more active in their vocabulary learning: depending on their level, theycan be invited to discover new meanings, to observe habitual collocations, to relate wordsto syntax, or to be critical of dictionary entries.

y Students can be invited to reflect on language use in general, based on their ownexplorations of a corpus of data, thus turning themselves into budding researchers.

If anyone tries to tell you that this sounds like the sort of work that goes on only at universitylevel, dont believe them! Secondary school children are quite capable of making use ofconcordancers, providing you and they are well prepared for the task, as we will try to illustratein Section 5.

Another interesting use of concordances is to compare texts produced by native and learnerspeakers of a language. For example, you could put your students French or German essays intoa concordancer (assuming they had prepared them on a word-processor in the first place),alongside a body of authentic French or German texts. Then you could study how students

position words in sentences, and compare this with native speakers. Better still, you could getstudents to do this comparison themselves, as in Activity 13 in Section 4.

Although powerful professional concordancers can produce many different types of

concordances and other sophisticated data, and as such are invaluable to linguistics and literaryresearchers and to lexicographers, for most teachers KWIC concordances in the target languageare quite sufficient to their needs, and the rest of this module will concentrate on those, withsome interesting exceptions.

1.5 Learning task

Have a go at creating your own KWIC concordance, using an English keyword of your choice.See our list of online concordancers and corpora below: Websites.


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2. Concordance software and corpora


y 2.1 Concordance softwarey 2.2 Corpora

o 2.2.1 What is a corpus?o 2.2.2 How big should a corpus be?o 2.2.3 The composition of a corpuso 2.2.4 Online concordances and corporao 2.2.5 Creating your own corpus: an example projecto 2.2.6 Other sources of corpora

y 2.3 Discussion topic2.1 Concordance software

Two things are required to produce a set of Key Words In Context (KWIC):i. concordancing software (i.e. a concordancer)

ii. a corpus of texts in electronic formatA simple concordancer produces a list of words it locates in a corpus of authentic texts,displayed in the centre of the page and shown with parts of the contexts in which they occur.This is also known as a Key Words In Context concordance or a KWIC concordance:see Section 1.1. But some concordancers are also able to produce a fullconcordance comprising all the words and other linguistic elements of the corpus. In realitythere are numerous parameters to look for, such as speed, the size of the corpus the software canhandle, the languages supported, the amount and quality of the documentation; especially the last

point might be important if you are new to concordancing.

It is important to bear in mind that the following presentation of some of the concordancers onthe market is nota software review as such but simply a presentation to make you familiar withsome of the key features to look for and the screens that youll be working with. Trial or demoversions of most of these concordancers are available on the Web. All the necessary informationcan be found at their websites. Here well only deal with the very basic differences. Pricing alsovaries a lot - and so does the amount and quality of the documentation.

MicroConcord, which was written by Mike Scott in collaboration with the late Tim Johns, set thestandard. It was a concordancer written for DOS and published by Oxford University Press in1993, together with a substantial corpus of texts from theIndependentnewspaper and a manual

by Tim Johns.M

icroConcordwas impressive for its time, but programs running under DOS arenow technically obsolete. The following Figure 1 is a screenshot from MicroConcord.


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Figure 1: A screenshot from MicroConcord

Concordanceby R.J.C. Watt of Dundee University makes both a full concordance and a KWIC-concordance, which Watt refers to as a "fast concordance. The fast concordance is really fast.The full concordance is slower. Making a full concordance of a very large corpus requires a lotof computer power and patience.

The user interface is quite intuitive once you have worked a little bit with it. The split screen,with a wordlist on the left and the concordance on the right, is a nice feature. Printing aconcordance is possible. This concordancer supports most European languages. Unlike the otherconcordancers, Concordance is able to convert a full concordance into HTML format so that theconcordance can be used interactively through a Web browser. This makes it well suited forliterary studies: see Activity 14 in Section 4.

Figure 2: A screenshot from Concordance with Textview window opened

MonoConc by Athelstan is much like a Windows version ofMicroConcord. It can only producesingle word concordances, but it is very fast indeed, and since it is not so crammed with features


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the screen layout is very simple to work with. Like the others, this piece of software allowsprinting of the concordances.

Figure 3: A screenshot from MonoConc

Simple Concordance Program (SCP): Written by Alan Reed, this program is available free ofcharge. This program lets you create word lists and search natural language text files for words,

phrases, and patterns. SCP is a concordance and word listing program that is able to read textswritten in many languages.There are built-in alphabets for English, French, German, Greek,Russian, etc. SCP contains an alphabet editor which you can use to create alphabets for any otherlanguage. SCP runs both on PCs and Macs.

PhraseContext is a different kind of analysis tool. According to the author, Hans Jrgen KlarskovMortensen, the main idea behind it was not to create yet another concordancer, but to produce amore interactive tool. Most concordancers mainly present results which can be perused on thescreen.PhraseContextcan export nearly all its results in plain text format, which is directly

editable in the small editors that it features. These results can also be sent to the Clipboard,and/or in most cases be saved to a text file. An extension of this is what the author calls a"PhraseBook", a collection of annotated keywords and KWICs. In this way people - and thereseems to be more and more of them - who use a specialised corpus as a language reference intheir research, can build a collection of linguistic problems they have already solved.

Another ofPhraseContext's features is the ability to save wordlists, concordance lines and thePhraseBook to XML-files. This output can be manipulated by means of CSSs and/or Javascriptand/or XSL-formatting files for use in Web browsers. So far such scripts are sadly lacking, butthe current version ofPhraseContextcomes with some basic XSL-formatting files.

Besides ordinary concordancing tasks such as word frequency lists, application of stoplistsetc,PhraseContextalso calculates statistical significance (T-score, Z-score, MI and standarddeviation) of collocations and it retrieves clusters of words up to a length of6 words.

The documentation explains the main features of the software and outlines the necessarylinguistic choices the author had to make. References to relevant literature are also included..


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Figure 3a: A screenshot from PhraseContext

2.2 Corpora

2.2.1 What is a corpus?

It is necessary to have some notion of what a corpus is, in order to work with a concordancer.

Concordancing is part ofCorpus Linguistics, which is dealt with by Tony McEnery & AndrewWilson in Module 3.4. See also Michael Barlows Corpus Linguistics Site.

In this module we will only cover the most basic elements.

A corpus is either just one text or a collection of texts. In Section 1.1 samples of KWICconcordances fromRomeo and Julietare shown. In this case the corpus was Shakespeares play.A corpus can also be just one students essay. It goes without saying that if the intention is tostudy the style of, say, Shakespeare the corpus must be limited to his works, but if the intentionis to study the grammar and semantics of a whole language, the corpus must contain many textsrepresenting many genres. Likewise: If we want to study 18th-century English we must makesure that the corpus contains a representative amount of texts from the 18th century only. So thecontents of a corpus depend on the aims of the user.

2.2.2 How big should a corpus be?

How big a corpus one needs also depends on what it is to be used for. Basically the corpus mustbe so big that there are enough occurrences of the language elements we want to study.The Wordbanks Online corpus comprises about 550 million words and is well suited forlinguistic research. Letting our students loose on such vast masses of text is, in most cases, likelyto create more confusion than clarity. Far fewer words will often be sufficient. But, of course, if


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confronted with a really ardent advocate of misguided ideas of what is correct usage and what isnot, a failure to find examples of the misguided expressions in a corpus of 550 million words justmight make an impression on him/her. Chris Tribble argues that a specialist micro corpus ofabout 25,000-30,000 words will be quite adequate for most educational purposes. On the otherhand, see Tribble and Jones (1997:11): We tend to think that a word like crime is a commonword but it actually occurs only about 20 times in every one million words of a 'balanced"collection of texts such as the Longman-Lancaster corpus. Later well show examples of what

can be done with a corpus of about 50,000 German words.

2.2.3 The composition of a corpus

One of the prime advantages of concordancing in language teaching is the opportunity to userelevant, authentic and interesting examples as opposed to made-up traditional grammarexamples. This means that if we are trying to teach students how to write an argumentativeessay, we should use authentic argumentative texts to teach them the language that such essayscall for. And likewise, if the subject is imaginative writing, we should use model texts that fitthis genre. How difficult an issue this really is can also be seen from the following example.Recently a Danish publisher released a massive 2277-page English-Danish dictionary based

primarily on a corpus of19th century texts. As one reviewer of the dictionary comments:

If you are reading Unsworths medieval novel from 1995 you will not be able to find Ostler,Tourney, Morality Play, Lychgate nor Mead. [] If you are reading classical ballads,you will not be able to find fain. [] Reading a Bram Stoker short story, Draculas Guest, youwill not be able to find "he answered fencingly.

These examples are more than just a pedants protest - they illustrate how vast and complex ourlanguages are (Source: Mogens Kjr: To-i-en?, Gymnasieskolen, Nr. 3,2000,pp. 27ff.).

2.2.4 Online concordancers and corpora

In a few cases both concordance software and a useful corpus can be found online. Here aresome examples:

English and Multilingual

British National Corpus: A very large corpus of modern British English designed to present aswide a range of modern English as possible. English only.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor: An online concordancer and corpora in corporain English, French, German and Spanish. Many other useful activities too.

Google: Using Google as a simple concordancer, e.g. to check for possible collocations, works

quite well. Is is possible, for example, to say "a metal wood"? Yes, indeed! Google citesnumerous examples. In German does one say "Ich bin im Internet gesurft" or "Ich habe imInternet gesurft"? Well, both are used, but one form definitely dominates. Enter the whole phrasein inverted commas in Google's search box and you will find hundreds of examples of how the

phrase is used. You can use a wildcard(* - the asterisk character) if you are not sure of thespelling of a word or wish to look for two words used together but separated by other letters orwords, e.g. a search forich * habe gesurft(no inverted commas round the phrase) will find "Ichhabe gesurft"and "Ich habe gestern mittag noch normal gesurft" - very handy in German whendifferent parts of the verb are separated. Enter the combination ich * habe * Internet *

gesurft(no inverted commas round the phrase) and you should find examples such as "Dann


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habe ich im Internet nach Rezepten gesurft":http://www.google.co.uk. See Robb(2003). Multilingual.

KWICFinder: A concordancer that rides on the back of a standard search engine, enabling thewhole Web to be used as a text corpus. Multilingual.

WebCorp: A concordancer that works right across the Web, riding on the back of different

search engines. It's quite slow, but it produces good results. WebCorp includes a word-listgenerator that will produce a word frequency list of a Web page in a wide variety of languages.Operated and maintained by the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES)at the Birmingham City University, UK. English.

Wordbanks Online:A corpus that evolved out of the Collins Cobuild Bank of English corpusthat forms the basis of the Collins range of dictionaries. The corpus comprises about 550 millionwords of contemporary written and spoken English. Access is by subscription. English only.

German

Mannheim Corpus: A very big - and free - corpus of German texts. This includes a choice ofcorpora and a lot of search facilities.

French

Corpus Lexicaux Qubcois: Canadian French corpora with search facilities.

Other languages

See the references underWebsites.

A characteristic feature of online corpora and concordancers is their size - they are in fact verybig indeed. They can be used to create your own handouts for your students - or for your ownreference. But classroom use of them is perhaps only suitable for quite advanced students whoare really interested in linguistic details and who really understand what a corpus is, what thesearch facilities do and how they work. Later we will show some examples of their use.

2.2.5 Creating your own corpus: an example project

For this project we need a German corpus. Let us suppose that this does not already exist so wewill have to make it ourselves. In this case we are only interested in examples of relativelyelementary German grammar, so almost any modern German text written by a professionalwriter will do. We aim to use the Internet to get the texts. This is the step-by-step process:

i. You can find a corpus by consulting the references under Websites. Or you can go straight to theGerman Gutenberg Project site, where you will find links to sample texts in German.

ii. Open your browser and go to the Gutenberg Project site. Reduce the size of the browser window by clicking onthe Restore icon in the top right corner of the screen:

iii. Open your word-processor with a new blank page. Reduce the size of this window too. Now you should haveboth the browser window and word-processor window open on your screen. Arrange the sizes of the windows sothat you just have a small word-processor window visible and a larger browser window open. See the examplein Figure 4(below).


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Figure 4: Creating your own corpus

iv. Click in the browser window. Mark the text you want. Position the cursor in the marked text, click the left mousebutton and keep it pressed. Now you can drag the text into the word-processor window. When the word-processor shows a tiny vertical line like this | release the mouse button, and the text is copied to your word -processor!

v. Go back to the browser window. Find a new text and repeat the procedure above until you have collected thetexts you need.

If for some reason you do not want to use this method you can save the Web pages in their

entirety. For example, choose File / Save asinInternet Explorer. Alternatively, use theWindows Clipboard: mark the text, copy it to the Clipboardand paste it into your word-

processor.

2.2.6 Other sources ofcorpora

CD-ROM

Instead of using texts collected from online sources you can use CD-ROM encyclopaedias or anyother source of electronic text as suggested by Chris Tribble. The practical method is basicallythe same as the one described above in Section 2.2.5.

Texts on paper

It is also possible to convert texts on paper into machine-readable text. For this youll need ascanner that can convert the printed text into a computer image. The scanner only makes adigitised image of the text. But a so-called OCR (OpticalCharacter Recognition) program canconvert the text into machine-readable text. Nowadays good scanners and quite sophisticatedOCR software are quite reasonably priced. Usually OCR software is supplied with the scanner,and more often than not that software will adequately suit these needs. Of course scanning andrecognising paper texts takes much longer than just copying them from the Internet, although itmay take you time to find what you want on the Internet.


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Typing text

The most time-consuming way of getting machine-readable text is to type it into a word-processor. But it can be done!

What format? ASCI or ANSI?

All the concordancers described in this module requireplain ASCII/ANSI text-formatand usuallythe concordancers prefer the text formatted with CR/LF (a so-called hard return) after each

line. All modern word-processors can save in ASCII or ANSI format. Usually you choose Saveas and then you get a drop-down menu with the different formats.

There is a difference between ASCII and ANSI text format, which is important if you areworking with other languages than English. ASCII is the oldest computer text format and wascreated on the basis of English. ANSI text, a variant of ASCII format, is used by Windows. Theadvantage is that ANSI text-format includes consistent codes for characters using diacriticalsigns allowing us to make concordances of all the European languages - and non-European if theappropriatefonts are installed on the computer. The Windows concordancers mentioned aboveall work with ANSI text-format, whereas MicroConcord(a DOS program) works with ASCIItext-format.

2.3 Discussion topic

Stevens (1995) notices that the corpus preparer may introduce bias into the corpus if he/sheselects data based on preconceived notions of what ought to be there, or on pedagogic grounds.Is this a tricky issue at all? If so: why? Compare also with traditional grammars and textbooks.

3. How does the use ofconcordances fit in with language

teaching methodologies?


y 3.1 A brief history of concordancing and how it helps understand the claims made for itas a teaching and learning tool

o 3.1.2 Learning tasky 3.2 What claims are made for concordancing and how is concordancing expected to

further good practice in teaching?o 3.2.1 "Real" language and authenticity of the learning context

3.2.1.1 Discussion topic 3.2.1.2 Learning task

o 3.2.2 Analytical powers

3.2.2.1 Learning task 3.2.2.2 Discussion topico 3.2.3 Language awarenesso 3.2.4 Curiosity and learner independence

3.1A brief history ofconcordancing and how it helps understand the claims

made for it as a teaching tool

Concordances date back to the Middle Ages, when, like other massive undertakings like Gothiccathedrals or the Bayeux Tapestry, they took up an unimaginable amount of person power. An


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early example of this, according to Tribble & Jones (1997), is the first known completeconcordance of the Latin Bible, the work of some five hundred Benedictine monks workingunder Hugo de Sancto Charo. Biblical concordances are indexes comprising the words in theBible and the location of the texts where they can be found. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists anumber of early biblical concordances, including that drawn up by Mercator, the 14th centurycartographer. The other favourite corpus of texts for early concordancers, at least in the English-speaking world, is Shakespeare.Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that Bartlett, the American

bookseller and editor best known for his Familiar Quotations wrote, after many years of labour,a Complete Concordance to Shakespeares Dramatic Works and Poems (1894), a standardreference work that surpassed any of its predecessors in the number and fullness of its citations.

Because of the canonical status which they have in the culture of the English-speaking world,Biblical and Shakespearian texts have two things in common: they need to be frequently andefficiently accessed, and they have to be interpreted (and reinterpreted). So these earlyconcordances functioned as archiving tools, answering the access need, and as text analysistools, facilitating interpretation of meanings by bringing words and their contexts into closer

proximity on the page, thus sharper focus.

Todays computerised concordances still fulfil these two functions, the practical and the

scholarly. Professional archives, on the Internet or on the intranet in libraries and companies,illustrate the more practical use. For example, ifI am a lawyer or a law student, I can accessa concordance of legal contexts for the keyword Im interested in, and I then can assess thecurrency and coverage of the legal concept under scrutiny. This is clearly of great practicaladvantage to me. On the other hand, ifI am working with language itself, whether as alexicographer, a translator, a terminologist, a researcher in linguistics, a literary scholar, alanguage policy specialist, or even perhaps a forensic linguist, I will be interested both inaccessing the right texts fast, and in interpreting the language which I discover. So intense isinterest in the scholarly application of concordancing that since the 1980ies many nationalcultures have invested heavily in the creation of great electronic searchable databases, which arereal monuments to their language and their literature. For non-English-speaking cultures, suchinitiatives can also be an important part of their political strategy for linguistic survival.

3.1.2 Learning task

Search the Internet to find out as much as possible about one of the following great nationallanguage corpora. For instance what is it called, when was it set up, by whom, how big is it, whatkind of corpus does it use, what are the conditions for access to it, how frequently is it updated,what kind of search facilities does it offer?

French: The ARTFL Project, the project for American and French Research on the Treasury ofthe French Language

German: The Mannheim CorpusItalian: The OVI Project (Opera del Vocabolario Italiano)

English: The British National Corpus

Educational concordancing too has a history, although it is much shorter, having started in the1980ies. For a summary of its evolution in ELT have a look at Stevens (1995). Claims made forconcordancing for educational purposes typically have several facets. One is that concordancersfacilitate access to 'real' target language (TL) lexical and grammatical structures. Another is that


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they can make students more active and independent analysers of language, turning them to anextent into language researchers. The rest of this section looks at how they fit in with currentteaching methodologies and practices.

3.2 What claims are made for concordancing and how is concordancing expected

to further good practice in teaching?

3.2.1 "Real" language and authenticity of the learning context

Language teachers want to provide activities and materials that conform with native speakers use of the language. Thebelief is that this is motivational and provides better preparation for le arners when they come into contact with written orspoken native speaker utterances. Many traditional grammar books, textbooks and dictionaries contain only inventedexamples, and that can only reflect the particular ways in which their authors, eminent sc holars though they may be, usetheir mother tongue. However, a language is owned by all its native speakers, not by one small subset, and furthermore, itevolves all the time. But can we as teachers, whether we are trained non -TL speakers or TL native speakers, always claimto have a realistic perception of real usage as it evolves? How many of us have had the embarrassing experience of givinga "rule" to a learner, only to be contradicted by some piece of TL evidence? Sinclair (1986:185-203) encapsulates theteachers problem with the comment that we need to find explanations that fit the evidence, rather than adjusting theevidence to fit a pre-set explanation. Working with real language data, also called Data Driven Learning (DDL ) by TimJohns, fits this aim perfectly. DDL allows very easy access to a huge number of extremely varied native speaker

productions - although, unsurprisingly, it is a little more difficult to find transcriptions of spoken language. See

also Module 3.4, Corpus Linguistics.

However, this raises the question of how prescriptive teachers should be in the choice of TL models offered: it is all verywell forFrench natives to write des grands bateaux, flouting the grammar book rule that says it should be de grands

bateaux, but we should teach grammar book usage or street usage? This question arises in every form of languageteaching, but in concordance-based teaching the issue is brought into sharper focus. If the corpus that we use containsunedited material - as it should, if we want to be authentic - then concordancing searches will throw up some questionableusages. There are ways of avoiding this (for example pre-editing the corpus ourselves or using only carefully edited TLtexts such as encyclopaedias and other pedagogical texts) but this re-introduces an element of teacher control by the backdoor and defeats the purpose of exposing learners to real TL forms. Pragmatic decisions will be needed, based on learners

proficiency levels and teaching objectives.

3.2.1.1 Discussion topic

It is important to provide students with examples taken from real corpora, according to McEnery & Wilson (1996),because they expose students at an early stage in the learning process to the kinds of sentences and vocabulary whichthey will encounter in reading genuine texts in the language or in using the language in real communicative situations.Discuss some arguments in support or in contradiction of this idea (perhaps successively adopting the perspectives ofgrammar-based teaching and of communicative teaching).

3.2.1.2 Learning task

Think about how you would explain the difference between "uninterested" and "disinterested" to (a) native Englishspeakers and (b) non-natives. Use one of the online concordancers and corpora that we list below underWebsites to helpyou determine the difference. How would you use this data to enrich your explanations?

3.2.2Analytical powers

Kettemann (1996) cites the Council of Europe's document (1994:10) concerning the Common European Framework ofReference (CEFR) for Languages: "Language pedagogy has hitherto paid little attention to this dimension but should infact develop explicit objectives and practices to teach methods of discovery and analysis." This, as Kettemann reminds us,is a very good reason why teachers should use computers in the classroom. The computer, he points out, is a powerfulhypothesis testing device on vast amounts of data, [] allows controlled speculation, makes hidden structures visible,enhances at the same time imagination and checks it by inductivity, thus making higher degrees of objectivit y possible.See also Kettemann's article titled "On the role of context in syntax and semantics".

Why would we want a powerful hypothesis-testing device? Because learners need to have tested any rule against as manyexamples as possible before they can fully internalise it. Why involve the imagination? Because learners remember theknowledge which they have formulated themselves rather than formulations which have been imposed on t hem.


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These are only assumptions, but they have found support in research, see Stevens (1995). Undeniably, whether they aredisplayed as KWIC lists (like the example of "sin" in Section 1.1) or as columns of matching data (like the parallelconcordance example using "pour"), concordance outputs make patterns more noticeable.

Note: Bernhard Kettemann's website is an excellent source of publications on and references to concordancing and corpuslinguistics: http://www-gewi.uni-graz.at/staff/kettemann/

3.2.2.1 Learning Task

Have a look at Activity 4 (French) orActivity9 (German) in Section 4, and formulate an empirically-based "rule" for thepatterns of behaviour of the word.

3.2.2.2 Discussion topic

Talking about the teaching of linguistics McEnery & Wilson (1996) have remarked:

In our own teaching we have found that students who have been taught using traditional syntax textbooks, which containonly simple example sentences such as Steve puts his money in the bank [] often find themselves unable to analyselonger, more complex corpus sentences such as The government has welcomeda report by an Australian royalcommission on the effects of Britains atomic bomb testing programme in the Australian desert in the fifties and earlysixties...

Discuss to what extent this also applies to the teaching of English to non -native English speakers

3.2.3 Language awareness

Communicative teaching coupled with exclusive target language use has undoubtedly brought many benefits to learnersbut some re-evaluation of its merits is currently taking place. Discussing which language is used in the classroom, Klapper(1998:22-28) approves of that revolution which has come over many secondary classrooms in recent years: the use of theFL as the principal language of instruction but goes on to point out the need to avoid immersion dogmatism. A commonL1 in an L2 learning setting is an obvious classroom resource which should not be overlooked. Raising learnersawareness of the TL is linked to raising their mother -tongue awareness, which argues for a reassessment of bilingual (ormultilingual) work with learners, and for greater encouragement to learners to "notice" forms, rather than simply use them.In other words, let learners fluctuate between L1 and L2 as appropriate, as this will help them work on the myth that thereare one-to-one equivalences between one language and the next, as well as helping them gain a better grasp of whatlanguage forms are and get into the habit of discussing them.

Another source of support for the concordancer as a facilitator of language awareness comes from Willis (1999) and hisefforts to promote the "lexical syllabus". Challenging the distinction between grammar and lexis, he shows that wordsshould be taught in their "patterns" or "frames". For instance a pattern like the idea (or risk, or thought, or hope) of -ingasthe right "feel" for English. Other frames might be possible but simply dont occur, such as the wish of -ing. Teaching allthese words individually, or teaching the rule about of + -ingis not sufficiently helpful to the learner. Willis denies thatwords are single items and grammar tells us how these items combine. For him Rather than grammar on the one handand lexis on the other, we have an intricate relationship between the two. The interrelationship of lexis and syntax issomething that jumps off the page or the screen, for anyone who is at all familiar with concordancer searches. KWICconcordances are rich in such patterns as the one Willis mentions, and, given a little dexterity with search techniques,users can easily create large collections of them for further learning.

3.2.4 Curiosity and learner independence

Language learning pedagogy has for a few years now argued in favour of the development of learner autonomy. Forexample, by Little (1996) claims that successful language use over time depends on continued language learning, and thatto develop proficiency in a second language we need to be ready to turn almost any occasion of language use into anoccasion of conscious language learning. So good language learning means regularly stepping back from purelycommunicative activities, and casting a critical eye over ones own understandings and ones own strategies. Usingconcordancers, because they facilitate language awareness, also provide opportunities for such critical activities.

Furthermore, increased exposure to authentic texts has turned teachers (and some students ) into more discriminating usersof textbooks and led them to question the authority of grammars and dictionaries. McEnery & Wilson (1996) list fourseparate studies of ESL textbooks that have shown that teaching materials not based on authentic data can be positivelymisleading to students. Combating the effects of th is was one major aims of the Collins Cobuild Bank of English project at


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the University ofBirmingham through the publication of hard -copy corpus-based dictionaries and textbooks likethe Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary and theCollins Cobuild English Grammar. But even these tools areedited, and therefore not as useful as a raw concordance for those who like to exert their critical faculties on a piece oflanguage.

What about curiosity, though? Students can be in charge without necessarily growing morecurious. For example, they can be given data to manipulate, individually or in groups. Or a groupcan be asked to create concordances for use as gap-filling tests to set for another group, as part of

a competitive game. Classroom applications are numerous, as Section 4 aims to show. But unlessthese tasks are given a validity other that conferred by the teaching setting, students may well notsustain interest beyond the initial buzz of working with a new piece of software. Student-centeredness implies a large measure of real freedom to choose learning tasks, in this case tasksoutside of the teaching context, for instance searching the Internet for texts of real relevance totheir individual lives. Teachers willing to grant this freedom will have to evolve pedagogiesreconciling student interests (unpredictable and changeable) with the cognitive content of thelearning activity (which has to be delivered in a planned and reliable way). Well-thought-outconcordancer tasks using as varied a corpus as can be mustered, can offer one way to square this

particular circle, particularly if students preferences are genuinely allowed to influence thechoice of corpus texts.

4. Some practical illustrations


y 4.1Introductiony 4.2 Activities and worksheetsy 4.3Further ideas for working with literary texts

4.1 Introduction

In this section we aim to provide you with some practical examples of worksheets which you can print and use with yourstudents if you think its appropriate, But we have only given you a small selection of what can be achieved. We hope thatthese examples will act as triggers to s timulate your creativity! Some of the examples are in French, others in English,others in German. In most cases the kind of thinking used in a French example can equally well be used in a Spanish orSwedish context if it is translated not only into that language as such but into the grammar, syntax and lexis of thatlanguage.

When working with concordances, whether paper-based or interactive, students have to cope within a double set oflimitations: their level of language proficiency and their level of familiarity with concordances. When you offer a series ofconcordance-based exercises you will not always be able to grade them according to both criteria. Our experience is thatyou cannot overestimate the students need for familiarity with the appearanc e of concordances, and their need forguidance as to how to derive conclusions from lists of citations. One way of ensuring this is to provide plenty of practicewith paper-based exercises first, so that students get used to inductive reasoning before they are asked to cope with theadditional burden of manipulating a piece of software, however simple it may seem to you. Also, by providing paperhandouts in the early stages of classroom work with concordances, you will be able to simplify a little the somet imesstartling physical appearance of concordances, so that learners get well used to them and can move on to use the inevitablymore complex ones which they will create when they start using concordancers interactively.

In any preparation for teaching it goes without saying that you should try the exercises on guinea pigs before presentingthem to a class. But with concordancing, this really becomes essential: your results will depend to a large extent on thecomposition of your corpus, so be warned and always try activities out first!!

Since a corpus and a concordancer in principle lets you and your students examine almost all aspects of your targetlanguage the crucial point is to discover ways of making the relevant aspects of the target language appea r in the


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concordances. Or put in a less formal lingo: The teachers task in concordancing in the classroom is to ask precisely theright questions.

Contrary to teaching with traditional textbooks, exercise books and grammars the teacher will often discover that aparticularly productive question or activity brings up material and linguistic facts that neither student nor teacherexpected. This calls for another type of teacher-role than the most traditional one(s). Well return to that point in Section 6.

4.2Activities and worksheets

ACTIVITY NAME AND

LANGUAGEPURPOSE OF

ACTIVITYPRESENTATION

1. Guess the mystery word (F) beginners, lexis paper,online (LAN)

2. Donc on peut dire que (F) style, usage paper, online (LAN)

3. Sagit(F) derive a rule, grammar paper, online (LAN)

4. Beware false friends (F) lexis paper, online (LAN)

5. Coffee or tea? (F) cultural differences paper, online (LAN)

6.Les Anglais etlesBritanniques (F)

political correct, usage,lexis

paper, online (LAN)

7. Changing lifestyles (F) cultural differences,usage

paper, online (LAN)

8. drfen and mssen (G) lexis, usage paper

9. Preposition am (G) usage paper

10. Syntax of adverbs (E) driving a rule, grammar,syntax, statistics, usage

online (WWW)

11. reason + because (E) correctness, usage online (WWW)

12. Students own writing (E) variety, usage online, standalone PC

13.Laigle noir(F) literary analysis online (LAN)

14. Mariana(E) literary analysis online (LAN orWWW)

Activity 1: Guess the mystery word

Aim of the activity: To familiarise students with the physical appearance of a KWICconcordance and with the importance of left-context and right-context when working withkeywords. This is to be used with people who are complete beginners at concordancing.

Worksheet: Read the grid below, where the nonsense word "gloup" has been entered instead ofa real word. Your job is to decide with your group what that mystery real word is. When youhave made up your mind, discuss with your group what the answers to the three questions listed

below the grid should be.

1. pport critique sur certaines utilisations abusivesde la

gloup est devenu un geste banal plus quune dcision.

2. que pour beaucoup dentre nous le fait dallumer gloup .


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une3. laquelle on est pris pour gens qui sabrutissent

lagloup , dans une proportion croissante depuis 1896

4. Tous les grands moments de gloup superposent un message recherch et un messa5. sieurs postes et laugmentation du temps de

diffusion (gloup du matin et de la nuit).

6. dailleurs 21% des Franais reconnaissent regarder

la

gloup Mme si le programme les ennuie. 34% seulem

7. rmettent une plus grande matrise individuelle dela

gloup . Les comportements des tlspectateurs en ont

8. ux Pays-Bas que lon regarde le moins longtempsla

gloup : 89 minutes par jour, contre 228 en Grande-Bret

9. publications, diffusent des missions de radio oude

gloup . Et dcouvrent les vertus des communications

i. When reading the grid, at which point (i.e. at which line number) did you start to suspect the truth?ii. What word or words gave you the most useful clue?

iii.

Lines 1 and 2 could make you think of a very different mystery word. What is it, and what clues could make youthink this?

Ideas for the creation of handouts in different languages: try similar exercises with wordsthat have dual meanings or different meanings in different varieties of the language. With suchwords, contexts will contribute strongly to the guesswork required. E.g.English chip orbathroom (in its US meaning), French dpanneur(and its Qubcois Frenchmeaning), Spanish and Latin Americanpasaje ormanejar, Italianpenna orcolpito.

Activity 2: Donc on peut dire que

Aims of the activity: To raise students awareness of stylistic differences between differentpositions of "donc" in sentences. the placement of "donc" in French in formal written textscompared to informal ones. Ideally, this comparison should be carried out contrasting a writtencorpus with a corpus of spoken language. However, these are very hard to come by for mostlanguages, so instead we have used two corpora from Corpus Lexicaux Qubcois, one of themfrom an archive of letters written by people with no formal education, in a style very close tospoken French. Many of the words were spelt phonetically in the original and to avoid confusingstudents we have rectified spelling errors. However, original word order and punctuation have

been preserved.

Worksheet: In French you could place a word like "donc" at the very beginning of a sentence,

(e.g. "Donc on peut dire que"). But you often find it between the main verb and what followsthe main verb (e.g. "On peutdonc dire que"). Is one better than the other? Where should you

put "donc"? To find out, have a look at the two lists below, both from Qubec (French Canada).List A is from a set of engineers reports about the building of an airport in Inuit territory. List Bis from a collection of handwritten letters sent by poor farmers to the authorities (in this case a

priest), to ask for financial help. These letter-writers have not studied composition and they writemore or less as they speak.

Your job is to look at how many times "donc" is found at the very beginning of sentences andhow many times it occurs immediately after the main verb, in each list. When you have done


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this, draw a conclusion about where you should place "donc" when you write a formal essay, andwhere you may put it when you are writing (or speaking) in an everyday situation.

List A

Il devient donc difficile de proposer un plan de gestion de ces troupeaux. u Qubec et de tout promoteur dvelopper les

terres etdonc , restreindre les droits des autochtones.

Elle permet donc la circulation des avions de grandes dimensions en cas debesoin.

Ce droit exclusif nattnue donc pas du tout les droits de ces derniers puisque ils ont accs toutes les

Les autochtones ont donc priorit quant la rcolte.

Les Inuit ont donc fait part de leurs points de vue sur limpact du Complexe ainsique leur

Il serait donc intressant de comparer des donnes plus rcentes afin de Ces chiffres rvlent donc une tendance la baisse entre 1976 et 1980 mais srement

aussiLes donnes furent donc suggr de rpartir les territoires de chasse selon des zones

Ils ont donc peur de ne pas avoir suffisamment obtenu de terrains pourpermettre

Lun des aspects ngatifs de la mise enapplication de donc de ne pas avoir atteint lobjectif de mettre en place unmcanisme

Il faut donc dterminer les espces touches et leur importance relative Cest donc lpaisseur calcule en fonction du gel qui prime

Ils peuvent donc thoriquement rencontrer la demande de transportpour les annes

List B

lhiver. Aussi le Pre Joseph. Guayaussi ce sont tous des invalides.

Donc je crois quil serait propos de leur donner quelque chose

deux mois, on sait que vous

en envoyez et on nen a pas alorstchez

donc sil vous plat dtre assez bon de nous envoyer leur nom

le grand besoin avec unefamille de 9 enfants a fait bien dur.

Donc Je compte sur votre secours afin de pouvoir passerlhiver

bras forts pour envisager les durstravaux qui se rencontrent sur un lot

Donc excusez-nous de vous avoir drang dans vos nombreusesoccupations. Esprant vous lire sous

garder mes enfants la maison et lespriver de linstruction. Je compte

donc sur votre grande gnrosit pour nous tirer dembarras.

de cet rgent, et depuis longtempspour financer mes petites affaires.

Donc esprant quavec votre concours je recevrai ce petit montantbientt Je demeure votre tout

seront pays et ceux qui netravailleront pas nauront droit rien

donc il faudra quils travaillent pour avoir de laide si non rien. Mais

transport qui mempche definir cette transaction. Je vous serais

donc bien oblig de me dire quels moyens je pourrais prendre pourobtenir un prix rduit

Notre Dame Du Lac Co Tmiscouata.Cher Mr Jeviens

donc vous crire pour vous demander si je peux avoir de loctroipour racheter ma

le btir tout de suite pourvu que je soiscertain davoir ma prime

Donc je me fie entirement vous pour rgler cette affaire -l et jevous remercie

anne il va tre fini mais mais cette anne laCompagnie Fraser lachte.

Donc esprant recevoir une bonne rponse de vous le plus ttpossible. Votre

autre mais je nai pas dargent et ils demandentdj un bon prix

donc sil vous plat enseignez-moi les moyens prendre pour lefaire annuler et

Bien cordialement.Soyez

donc assez bon de me dire sil y a encore de bons lots prendre


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Je connais la terre tant fils de cultivateur. Donc Monsieur le Cur je sais que si vous le voulez je pourrais allersemer

bien si vous pouviez venir inspecter ce chemin donc je veux pas vous ennuyer avec cela

Ideas for interactive extension work:If youre an English speaker, try comparing the work that

you have just done on the position of "donc" with the position of its English equivalent"therefore". First, think where you would put "therefore" if you were writing an essay. Use oneof the online concordancers and corpora that we list below under Websites to do a free search

based on "therefore". What conclusion can you draw about some of the rules of "good" writingin French and in English?

Activity 3:Le roman sagit dun amour malheureux

Aim of the activity: to get students to derive (by induction) the rule that "sagit" never takes anysubject other than the impersonal pronoun "il".

Worksheet: "Le roman (or 'le pome' or 'la pice') sagit dun amour malheureux" Whenteachers ofFrench read this kind of phrase in students essays, they are likely to whip out theirred pens and score out the first two words. Why? To answer this, read the following. Then withyour group, explain the teachers reaction, and decide what precaution you should always takewhen using the verb "sagit".

1. e de sadapter au monde contemporain. Il sagit de savoir si lon table, oui ou non 2. es, de Beurs ni de Blacks (hlas). Il ne sagit pas dune bande dessine mais3. is gaulois. On en use prsent quand il sagit dvoquer les solutions apportes

4. oins comme ami, simplement parce quil sagit de quelquun de diffrent5. une femme. Et rciproquement. Quand il sagit de cette diffrence-l il y a6. olution partiellement dans le prototype. Il sagit de dfinir les autorisations7. uation de llve faite par le systme. Il sagit donc de recueillir ces informa 8. le welfare State, ltat -providence, il sagit dune approche globale et

9. pen Hans van den Broeck, selon lequel il sagit daider la Grce rpondre10. fres et Franois Maspro, montrent quil sagit bien dunivers distincts, qui11. meront peut-tre certains, pensant quil sagit une fois de plus dun ouvrage

12. virtuel des diffrends (chapitre VI). Il sagit l dun ensemble de mesures lo13. Aucun tablissement ne part de rien.

Ilsagit donc de faire linventaire de

14. cours multimdia danglais (HELLO). Il sagit dune ralisation de la BBC en15. ont reprsents. Statutairement, il sagit dune simple association (type

16. Cela prend normement de temps. Il ne sagit pas seulement de les lire. Il

Activity 4: Beware of false friends


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Aim of the activity: To sensitise students to the differences between the English and Frenchfalse friend "information". Focus their attention on the grammatical differences (with or withoutan "s") and the way this relates to differences in meaning.

Worksheet: The phrases "some information about the situation" and "une information sur lasituation" mean the same. So from this viewpoint, the French word "information" is a goodtranslation for its English counterpart. But if you use a French corpus to search the keyword

"information", you will see that this similarity is only part of the story. Do a search using thekeyword "information*", adding a wild character as in the example that we have just given, andcompare the citationsin the singular and in the plural ("informations"). With your group, workout what the difference is between the singular and plural uses of the French word.

1. dpourvus: le bon sens. Dans le flot d informations autour du scandale de la2. nographiques ne fassent aucun travail d information sur les centres et les moy 3. de lhomme de raisonner et de grer les informations . Ds lors lhomme informa 4. s optimales les nouvelles techniques d information et de communication. Au p5. dias utiliss, la dynamique daccs l information , la dynamique dvolution 6. jout, la modification, la suppression d information, le dictionnaire peut7. comportement de llve. De plus ces informations peuvent tre utiles8. stme. Il sagit donc de recueillir ces informations sous une forme exploit

9. contrle du praticien. La formation et l information des mdecins et de leurs10. quil soit mis un terme la publication

dinformations paraissant dpasser le

Activity 5: Coffee or tea?

Aim of the activity: To sensitise students to the fact that the writings of a culture reflect habitsof people of that culture.

Worksheet:In this activity you are going to be asked to compare data, so make sure that youprint out each set of results as you progress. Look up "caf" using yourFrench concordancer(now print). Then look up "th" (and print). What conclusions can you draw about Frenchinterest in either of these drinks?

Concordance for "caf" and "th"

Number of times

cafappearedNumber of times

thappeared

In a Balzac corpus 99 times 19 times

In a 1998 corpus made

up of a selection of pressarticles

14 times Zro!

Ideas for interactive extension work: Use one of the online concordancers and corpora that welist below underWebsites to do the same two searches (this time using "coffee" and "tea"). Printeach. Compare the results from these searches with the printed sheets which you obtained earlier.From the evidence, draw some conclusions about each cultures interest in each of those drinks.


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Cultural stereotypes and artefacts can be used to great effect (and give a lot of fun) inconcordancing.

Activity 6:Les Anglais et les Britanniques

Aim of the activity: To sensitise students to changes in language use

Worksheet:First read the insert below, which has been adapted from the French dictionaryLePetit Robert, 1984 edition.

anglais, aise: adj. De lAngleterre (au sens tendu de Grande-Bretagne). Synonyme:Britannique le peuple anglais, la monarchie anglaise, la marine anglaise.

Now look at the following two searches, based on a corpus of texts written in 1998. Compare thelists thrown up by these searches, and the dictionary definitions. How has the French approach tonaming their Northern neighbours changed over the last few years of the 20th century?

Anglais, anglaise

1. Coutances sur un traffic de 70000 veaux anglais touchant la Manche, LAin et p 2. quelques rudiments mal digrs de langue anglaise ), des revues et de lplucha

3. natre la langue allemande et la langue anglaise , cest grotesque. Les pages 4. constante augmentation depuis 10 ans. L anglais fait un tabac sur les bancs de

5. de jeunes qui ont jet leur dvolu sur l anglais dans lenseignement gnral, t6. 87% des collgiens se sont rus vers l anglais premire langue, le plus souve

7. blic (85%) la monte en puissance vers l anglais premire langue, rgulire dep8. Michel Noir souhaite une volution l anglaise et ladoption du scrutin majori

9. te pilote du nouveau cours multimdia d anglais Hello). Il sagit dune ralisa

10. ses certificates. Elle men donna un en anglais car elle sortait disait-elle

Britannique

1. ennes et les volte-faces du gouvernement britannique leur paraissait bien lointaines 2. sociaux douloureux. Le premier minister britannique , M. John Major, en sait quelque

3. En revanche, rassur les investisseurs britanniques et la politique de relance 4. Aux chances lectorales les brokers britanniques nhsitaient pas miser sur

5. ntrle de la Midland, quatrime banque britannique . La HSBC emportait finalement 6. r. les vives attaques contre la monnaie britanniques . Le 16 septembre, la solida

7. jugue une baisse des taux britannique moins de 10% pour la premire 8. affaire personnelle, que la prsidence britannique ? Et si leurs dirigeants avaient 9. ratification du trait par le Parlement britannique a tellement influ au cours des

10. . Face une crise qui mine lconomie britannique les rponses ne sont pas toujours

Activity 7: Changing lifestyles


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Both sub-activities in this category look at language as it changes. The first one is easier, and involves a simplecomparison of two KWIC concordances. The second one is more demanding, and combines linguistic analysis of aconcordance with critical reading of an entry in a dictionary.

Aim of activity: to introduce students to the idea that a corpus reflects the society of its time. Also, to raise theirawareness that the result of a concordance search is highly dependent on what was in the corpus in the first place.

Worksheet: workout the meaning of the word "mail" in each row of each of the grids below, by guessing from thecontext if necessary. List A is taken from selected works ofBalzac (1799 -1850). List B is from several issues of theFrench weekly magazineLExpress, published in January 2000. What conclusions can you draw about how to choosetexts for use in the kind of vocabulary research that you are doing at the moment?

Balzac

Sil existe en province un mail , un plan, une promenade do se

hier avait t convertie en un mail , ombrag dormes sous lesquels

par les beaux temps sur le mail qui enveloppe la ville du ct de

vu promenant sa chienne sur le mail , rpondit le cur. Ah ! notre

jambes de hron au soleil, au mail , regardant la mer ou les bats de

Gurande, et se promena sur le mail , o il continua sa dlibrationCalyste aperut de loin sur le mail le chevalier du Halga qui se

fille, se croyant seuls sur le mail , y parlaient haute voix .

intelligence Jtais sur le mail quand Mlle de Pen-Hol parlait

promenait sa chienne sur le mail , la baronne, sre de ly

LExpress

is on transmet lannonce par e- mail au site, qui la publie gratuitement:

e la repression en Iran. Voici le mail (en anglais) dune etudiante iranieautres rubriques habituelles:

mto,mail , chat ainsi que des fonctions dag.

envoyait une copie de son adressee-

mail prive et le descriptif de sonmatriel

exion, pour lenvoi et la rceptionde

mail en direct. Des versions de cettebote

lordinateur pour les envoyer par mail un ami inculte. Rien nempche,n

60, cette fte se tenait sur un

grand

mail jalonn de platanes vieux comme

Duplus grand utilit pour recevoirun

mail , consulter son agenda ou surfersur

de signer sa dernire cration, E- mail , utilisant Internet pour dlivrer un

ainsi le quotidien britanniqueDaily

Mail vient-il de consacrer sa premire


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Activity 8: drfen and mssen

Aim of the activity: This activity takes its starting point in obvious similarities between two languages - in this caseEnglish and German. The activity ought to show the student that in German one cant say: Du musst nicht! The followingworksheet was made on the basis of KWIC -concordances ofdarf, drfen, mssen.

Worksheet:drfen and mssen

In English it is (grammatically!) acceptable to say:

y You must notbeat your children too hard.y You may notbeat your children more than once a week.

Of course the meanings of these two sentences are different, but that is another story.In German the meaning ofdrfen resembles that ofmay in English and mustthatofmssen. Is that really true?

A. Study these examples of the use ofdrfen and mssen in German:

...............Wer ist dein Vater? Das darfich nicht sagen. Was brummst ...

....dass Sie mein Landsmann sind, drfen Sie um keinen Preis von ...

................Preis von hier fort. Das drfen Sie mir nicht antun. Htten ...

.........warum haben Sie denn fahren mssen? Ach was! sagte Karl und ...er im schmutzigen Hemd erscheinen mssen. Sonst wre der Verlust des .............vor der Abreise hatte flicken mssen. Jetzt erinnerte er sich auch ........bis zum Morgen werde zuhren mssen. Also auch das noch. Dann ..........Klara nach seinen Hnden. Sie mssen noch sitzen bleiben, sagte Klara. .........dem Sparen sofort anfangen zu mssen. Er wurde, seinerForderung entsprechend,

.........sie nur auf einem Sofa schlafen mssen. Und nun schlafen Sie wohl, ...

.................Sie tun. Und die Augen mssen Sie offenhalten, ich kann Sie ...

B. Fill in the correct verb in the correct form:

....................Sie das? Ich nicht. Das _____________ Sie sich nicht gefallen lassen, ...

...............Sorgen zu haben. Aber es _____________ die Folgen meiner frheren Sorgen

...

......faulen und gefrssigen Robinson _____________ du dir kein Beispiel nehmen ...

C. State the rule. To express disallowance in German youuse:

______________________________________________________________________


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Activity 9: The preposition am

The use of prepositions is a concordancers darling. Often a corpus will give a lot of output and though their collocationsin different languages are somewhat similar they also differ quite a lot.

Aim of the activity:In the following output from a 50,000 word corpus of L. Tiecks writings the idea is simply to answerthe question by looking through the examples. We have done some editing of the output (but only to some extent) in orderto give an example of a relatively raw output from a concordancer.

Worksheet: The use ofam as a preposition of time in German

Look through the following KWIC-concordance ofam and decide in whichcases it is used as a preposition of time:

.......einem Gemache des Hauses bis am Morgen zu schlafen. Walther ging ...

......glnzenden Kfig hing ein Vogel amFenster, und er war es ...

....n andern noch seltsamem Traum.Am Morgen weckte mich die Alte,

...

.....................Alte aus und kam erst am Abend zurck, ich ging ihr

...

..............Stadt oder auf dem Felde, am lichten Tage mit scharfer Sichel ...

..bunden, und wir zerstreuten uns.Am andern Tage sind wir in ...

.............Jugend sein sollte. Ich ging am folgenden Morgen zu ihm, und

...

.....einen Abschiedsku verweigert.Am folgenden Tage, als Frau Catharina1593 .........ich durch Trnen zu erleichtern.Am Nachmittag trafFriedrich seineverehrte ...........Befriedigung zu finden, und so am schnsten mein Leben zu erfllen.........................mich nichts an. Als eram andern Tage etwas mehr bei..................mit der Erklrung, da eram Abend wiederkommen wolle. DerDech ................gegen jedermann erlaubte. Am schnen Sommertage strmte einegroe ........der einen so glnzenden Prinzen am Arme halte. Jetzt kam Friedrich.....h gegen ausgezeichnete Gste, die am Hofe vielen Einflu haben, zu.......guten Leuten, die freilich niemals am Hofe gelebt haben. Er umarmte...

................hten der Lebensmahlzeitam meisten schtzen und genieen.Friedrich ...

..Wundrich, und Labitte zeigte sich am meisten besorgt. Der Wirt des

...

.einige Schffen. Man wollte gleich am folgenden Tage etliche aus ihrer

...

........DerBischof von Baruth hatte am folgenden Tage die vornehmsten Geist

...

.chtlichen Tyrannei steuern wrde.Am folgenden Morgen, fuhr Josset fort, ...

............noch milder und gtiger als am vorigen Tage. Eure Erzhlung, sagte


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...

....zurckhalten, ihr seid selbst heut am Tage ein wenig einfltig. Der

...

......Labitte und Frau Catharina viel am Morgen geweint hatte. Nach Tische

...

.........GnadenBriefe selbst, die ich am folgenden Tage erhielt, bewogenmich, ...

Stallmeister, wissen um die Sache.Am Abend in der Dmmerung, indem...lie Kstein wieder fortfhren, deram folgenden Tage enthauptet wurde, so....er. Die Einwohner erstaunten, ihm am Morgen so zu begegnen, der...........Diener, und begab sich dann am Abend in den dunkeln, abgelegenen ...

Activity 10: Syntax of adverbs

Aim of the activity: this activity relies heavily on a statistical evaluation of the output. It took quite a while to figure outwhat corpus to use and what search words to use. In this case the activity makes use of an online corpus, but suchexercises can equally well - or perhaps better - be done interactively with a corpus of a moderate size. If you do not narrowdown your search, you may well obtain too much information to make it possible to draw a conclusion.

Worksheet: Syntax of adverbs

Open your browser and select one of the online concordancers and corpora thatwe list below underWebsites.

Exercise A

Search for never+should.

How many hits did you get? ______________

Try other combinations, such as never+would, never+should, never+could,always+could etc. and note how many hits you get.

Write down some of the citations here:

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Exercise B

Now reverse the order. Search for could+never etc.


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How many hits? _________

As for the word order of small adverbs of frequency and modals, the conclusion isthat _______________ usually precedes ______________________.

Look at the examples you noted in Exercise A. Think of reasons why theauthor(s) used that position of the adverb of frequency. Write them here:

__________________________________________________________________

Exercise C

Use the same method to discover the position of adverbs of frequency incompound verbs.

e.g. Never+has/has+never/always+could etc. And now think about the answer tothis question: is there a difference between UK and US usage?

Activity 11: reason + because

Aim of the activity: Correctness is often an issue with foreign language students. In this case online corpora can be usedsimply as a reference source. The sample also shows how the browsers search function can be used. The corpus that isused here is fairly small which makes the outcome slightly more predictable. Furthermore: The idea is that the number ofoccurrences of reason + because is relatively small so the conclusion could be that though it does occur it is not a usethat should be recommended.

Worksheet:reason + because

Question: How acceptable is a construction like this:

The reason is because he didnt want to harm her?

Answer:

1. Open your Web browser and point to the Corpus ConcordanceEnglish section at The Compleat Lexical Tutorwebsite. Enter the keywordreason in the search box at the top left of the screen and select a corpus inthe box to the right of the search box. Choose Sort by 1 word to keywordonly underCONTROLS and With associated word"because" within 4words to the right underOPTION. Then click on the Getconcordancebutton at the bottom right of the screen. Wait a few seconds for

the results to appear.2. Your search screen should look something like the image in Figure5 (below).

4. How many instances of reason + because did you find?

5. Try selecting different corpora in The Compleat Lexical Tutor to see howthe results vary. You can also try other online concordancers and corpora:see Section 2.2.4. For example, try entering "reason because" (withoutquotes) in the search box in WebCorp.


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Figure 5: Screenshot from The Compleat LexicalTutor

Activity 12: Students own writing

In this activity the corpus is the students own essay. It can best be done with a concordancer that can make a wordlist anda full concordance of the students essay, but of course KWIC concordances will work. Below we assume that theconcordancer can do both (for example R.J.C. Watts Concordance).

Aim of the activity: To make the students aware of a variety of way to express coherence in their essays. It should befairly easy to translate this worksheet into other la nguages.

Worksheet: Students own writing


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1. General

Load your essay into the concordancer. Look at the wordlist. Are there anywords you use many times? If that is the case, use a dictionary, a thesaurus oryour imagination to change some of the occurrences. Below youll find someideas.

2.Adding new information

Look at the wordlist again. Did you use any of these expressions:

alsofurthermorefurther

besideswhat is moremoreoverin additionespeciallylikeanywayin any caseabove all

3. Causality

Make a KWIC concordance of the word because. How many times did youuse it? See if one of the suggestions below can be used instead:

on account of

owing toon the grounds of (quite formal)the reason whyascause (caused by)

4. Conclusion

Did you remember to conclude? Maybe you did and just forgot to point it outverbally. Look in the wordlist to see if any of these words appear in youressay:

in shortto sum up/summing upin a wordall in allaltogethermore generallyin conclusionsoconsequentlyas a result


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thereforethus

Of course the use of these indicators of concluding vary a lot, so it may benecessary to check the use of them using a large corpus to find authenticexamples.

5. Contrast

Check the wordlist of your essay. How many buts do you have? Can any ofthese be used instead:

althoughon the other handunlikestillyet (in the beginning of a sentence)howeveron the contrarycontrary to

6. Comparison

Again look at the wordlist. How many times did you use like? Try to usesome of these instead:

asin the same waysimilarmore than

likewiseby comparisonin the same way/fashionresembleequallyas if

To see how these expressions are actually used you need a large corpus. Useone of the online concordancers and corpora that we list belowunderWebsites.


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Activity 13:Laigle noir

In this section we are interested in using concordancers for helping learners with the analysis of literary texts. Inevitably ,whatever text you select as the object of your study, there will be copyright restrictions on its use. Always make sure thatyou have obtained all necessary permissions before you undertake the (considerable) work of preparing a text for use withthe concordancer. See ourGeneral guidelines on copyright.

When youve read the activity below, you might well feel that it doesnt requires a concordancer to carry it out. Youwould be right. It could be done simply by using the Find facility of an ordinary word-processor, or even manually (ifyour learners apply themselves carefully to the task). To help us with the presentation of this activity, we decided to use ashort song. This is why manual or semi-manual treatment could also apply. However, the techniques we show here can(and should be) transferred to more complex texts, for instance a longer poem, a legend, a short story, a novelette or a

play. See further examples for English in Section 4.3.

Aim of the activity: to help students to gain a sense of underlying architecture of a text (here, a strikingly -structuredFrench song, relying on a mirror-pattern to tell the story of a sudden flashback to a persons childhood and equally suddenreturn to reality). You might want to do this kind of exercise to enhance your students enjoyment of e.g. songs and

poems. But you night also go on to lead them to do productive exercises, where they have to structure their o wn creativewriting. Ideally, you would be able to play the song Laigle noirto the class either before or while they read the full text,in the first part of the activity.

Worksheet: First you will be asked to readLaigle noir, a popular song by the late 20th century French singerBarbara.Then, by finding the position of a number of key-words in the song, you will discover how the story is structuredand told.

i. Read this text and make sure that you understand the story.

Laigle noir

1 Un beau jour ou peut-tre

Concord Applied Languages

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