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History of Concordance • The most popular type of concordance is one based on the Bible. Many Bibles have a concordance in the back. The editors choose prominent words and tell some of the verses in which those words are located. After the book, chapter, and verse is given, several words surrounding that word might be given and the word itself might be represented by a letter.
In addition to different sizes, there are different types. Some Bibles have topical concordances. This type of concordance chooses topics or ideas instead of words, then groups verses which relate to that topic or idea.
2 Functions of Concordancer • Practical • Scholarly
Many traditional grammar books, textbooks and dictionaries contain only invented examples, and that can only reflect the particular ways in which their authors, eminent scholars though they may be, use their mother tongue. However, a language is owned by all its native speakers, not by one small subset, and furthermore, it evolves all the time.
“they expose students at an early stage in the learning process to the kinds of sentences and vocabulary which they will encounter in reading genuine texts in the language or in using the language in real communicative situations.” - McEnery & Wilson (1996)
Comparison Uninterested Disinterested • 1. Hong Kong residents are usually uninterested in politics. • 2. Mr Kinnock is uninterested in finding a visionary "big idea". • 3. Difference between the interested and the uninterested. • 4. Those who remained uninterested in politics reacted by avoiding the news. • 1. Derrida's admirers, and perhaps some disinterested observers, would reject such charges. • 2. t literature was simply a matter of disinterested individual response. • 3. A true gentleman, valorous in arms, Disinterested and honourable. • 4. Some of that information has to be gathered by disinterested investigators, not by politicians.
To be ________________ is to be lacking in any sense of engagement with the matter:Sallie is uninterested in algebra. To be ________________ is to lack bias:Let the company call in a disinterested mediator to settle the dispute.
Teaching Ideas • Example sentences Concordances are an efficient way of providing students with a large amount of example sentences. These examples can be sorted so that similar usages appear together. Certainly, a dictionary contains examples, but often examples are too few.
Example sentences with gaps As above students can be given the concordances but with the key words deleted so that they have to use their grammatical and lexical knowledge to fill the gaps. This can be done as homework, or as a test. Once filled, the concordances then become example sentences.
Put in order Many common words have a number of usages and meanings. Students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage.
Find the rule Rather than tell students a particular rule, students can be given a set of concordances and asked to discover for themselves what rules can be deduced from the evidence. This could be something simple such as discovering that the verb form changes the third person. In addition, this task can be done with more complex patterns such as collocations.
As a computer quiz • With the advent of cheap and free authoring software it is now possible to create ones own internet quizzes (see 'hot Potato'). With such software it is possible to create quizzes in which students have to fill gaps. Just as these gaps can be part of a larger passage of text, they can also be part of concordance lines.
