Last week, Madam Rozina talked about concordance. Before we reflect on what we've learned, we will briefly explain what it is actually about. As stated in Wikipedia (2013),

Concordance: A collection of the occurrences of word-form. Basically, it is an index of word-form.

Concordance: A tool that can be used for language learning, for example corpus linguistic.

Concordance is used in language teaching and learning, data mining and data clean-up, literary and linguistic scholarship, translation and language engineering, corpus linguistics, natural language software development, lexicography, and content analysis in many disciplines including accountancy, history, marketing, musicology and many more.

Concordancer is used to make word list and it can be arranged. It can include frequency and percentage of words . Concordancer makes word lists of occurrence of each word in its context.  The contexts can be selected and arranged. It can handle large texts. It is also can save the selected word list and print it out.

There are some concordance programs for PC such as The Oxford Concordance Program (OCP), Word Cruncher, Tact and other software like The Child Language Analysis (CLAN), COALA, and The Longman Mini Concordancer (LMC). Example of the most common concordance web is WebCorp.

Screen cap of a concordance software

REFLECTION

            As you can see, concordance helps a lot in language learning. We believe concordance helps everyone, not just for language learning, but is also useful to learners who want to find the occurrence of certain words for the sake of gaining knowledge. It also saves up a lot of one’s time in searching for what he wants. It also can help language learners to find out other usage of certain words. For example, duck. Just type in the word 'duck', and you can see several different contexts using the same word. We also think that concordance is really helpful to Muslims and other people who are interested in knowing more about Islam and also the Quran. For example, if people want to search for hadiths as references, you could type hadith, and more than 100+ results would come out on the search engine. There is also a concordance specifically for Al-Quran. It is a tool that allows users to make them more understand the text by linking English words and their corresponding transliterated Arabic terms to passages, chapters and verses in the Qur'an.

            For students like us, tools like this assists people in their project or assignment. Frankly speaking, we've never known this kind of tool existed before. From this lecture, we would say that we're being grateful to actually encounter this tool as it would help not just us, but also to other people as well in doing their assignment by searching words they would want to find which is also a time-saving tool. People could expand their vocabularies, for English language and other languages as well. This can make learning to become more enjoyable and at ease.. No one really wants to study in a stressful manner as it would distort the learning process.