CONCORDANCES

Concordance is a software or tools that can be used to help analyze the language data available. In this article, the writer tries to present the relevance of corpus data in investigating language development without having to analyze concordances lines. Writer used a local learner corpus in order to highlight the existence of such corpora as well as the efficacy of these corpora in corpus-based studies. As we know language corpus had been used as the basis of dictionaries and teaching materials. There are many available concordances available such as Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Micro concord. Other than that, there is new software such as RANGE, which is developed by practitioners in linguistic, provided, and additional perspectives to corpus studies.

For this second blog we made some discussion among four student.and our discussion was based on the article on page 70 in OLT book.This article investigates language development based on data in the EMAS corpus using language production as well as lexical variety as indicator of development. This is EMAS corpus was collected in 2002 and consists of close to half a million words including untagged and unedited learner corpus that contain written data by about 800 students. This experiment involved students from year 5 of primarily school education, form 1 and form four who are average in English language proficiency. In this study all the student must write 3 types of essay based on picture series, the happiest day of my life and one essay selected by the teacher from the essays that respondent s had completed as part of their regular schoolwork. The study examines language development by comparing the performance of the 3 age’s groups about their language productivity and vocabulary use.
In term of language productivity, it indicated number of sentences per essay and the words per sentence. The results show the increase on the number of sentences per essay and words per sentence from the primary five to form 4 show that the older student cognitive maturity and produce more complex sentences. Another aspect that include in this study is range of vocabulary where the writer try to investigate about diversity of vocabulary used in a corpus by calculating the type of token ratio. A larger type to token is interpreted as an indication of a wider range of language used. Uncommon words tend not to be used frequently. The type to token ratio gradually show increases from the lower to the higher age groups. This shows that the oldest respondents use a wider range of vocabulary in their essays.


Another criterion that include in this study was the sophistication of the study. This can be determined by using specialized software such as RANGE, the analysis program that gives and indication of the kind of vocabulary used. This program analyzes text by comparing it to several base lists of frequently used words. First, it includes the most frequent 1000 words in English, second it included second most frequent 1000 words and the third includes the words not in the first 2000 words in the two previous lists but are frequent in upper secondary and university levels from a wide range of subjects and this include form of words and derived forms. From the three group students, a large of words used by the primary 5 students in the first category of most frequently 1000 English words. The percentages of both form1 and 4 is relatively smaller. This indicates that not only do the older age groups tend to use a wider range of words, but the word that they use also more sophisticated.