POSTING 6-CONCORDANCE

KHOR HEI LING (A121138) and I did this posting together.

Purpose of this article is let us know that the use of a corpus in language teaching and learning and also efficiently of it without analyzing the concordance lines. The data is taken from EMAS corpus that was collected in 2002 and involves around 500,000 words in it. This research was done by using the students that involved Primary 5, Form 1 and Form 4 students to write an essay to investigate the language development. A different topic of essay was given to different group of students. The topic of the essay is for elicit the amount of language as much as possible. Hunston (2002), says, “The essence of work on learner corpora is comparison.” So, we can say that language development in this article is compared with the three different ages of groups. In this article, the study on language development includes the language productivity, range of vocabulary and also sophistication of vocabulary. Language productivity is indicated by the number of sentences per essay and the words per sentence. The result shows that older students can produce longer essay and also more complex sentences compare with younger students. Besides, range of vocabulary is determined by calculating the type to token ratio. This article defines that a larger type to token ratio is an indication of a wider range of language used. On the contrary, lower ratio maybe is an indication of an over-reliance on a limited set of words. According to this study, the type to token ratio gradually increases from the younger to the older age groups. This represents that the older students use a wider range of vocabulary in their essays. This article also shows that two possible reasons contribute to the low type to token ratio that is the nature of the written text itself and the nature of the data itself. A modified type to token ratios for the three age groups is done due to these two possible reasons. The result shows that the type to token ratios became more acceptable and the values also show an increase in higher age groups. We can use Range (Nation, 2002), a vocabulary analysis program, to determine the sophistication of vocabulary. The program uses several base lists of frequently used words to compare the text. The first base lists includes the most frequent 1000 words in English. The second includes the second most frequent 1000 words and the third includes words not in the words in the previous lists but are frequent in upper secondary and university levels from a wide range of subjects. These three base lists include the base form of words and derived forms. The result shows that a clear development in the sophistication of vocabulary used. Primary 5 students (63.5%) used more words in the first category of most frequent 1000 English words compared with Form 1 students (57.9%) and Form 4 students (44.5%). Form 4 students had higher percentage of words used in the academic base list (5.2%) and in the unlisted category (28.1%) than other age groups. It can be say that older students prefer to use a wider range of words and more sophisticate words. In conclusion, this article tried to show the relevance and also efficacy of corpus data in investigating language development. Corpus data is very useful to tell us the language development. We can use this present data to compare with the future data to assess the development of the language program in Malaysia in the future.

CONTENT ANALYSIS

Content analysis can also be known as the analysis of text with the aid of algorithmic techniques. Content analysis included of qualitative analysis and it is used primarily in the social sciences. According to Stemler, 2001, content analysis is a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. Furthermore, the words extracted from the textual data for concording or statistical computation is involved in building and applying a concept of dictionary or fixed vocabulary of terms.

This technique is used because we often unable to analysis a whole long text systematically. This is because we often left out some important or others detail because of the text tend to be too large. In content analysis we often analysis it through some aspect, there are:

1. Genre – Analysis about the kind of text such as novelistic, poetic, bureaucratic or legal. Moreover we analysis whether it is originally written or delivered orally. We can also analysis what features the text has whether it is formal or informal and where we can spot this features.
2. Rhetoric and vocabulary – This will define a particular way of speaking, writing and to shape the vocabulary. For example, how frequently particular words appear.
3. Social or psychological circumstances – Familiarity with the social circumstances surrounding the creation of the text can be relevant. It also known or suspected psychology of the author or speaker.
4. Historical circumstances- The more you know about the historical circumstances under which the text was produced the better.
5. Nature of the artifact- The physical object, from which the text has been taken, usually a printed book, may be relevant. These, give reason to press about the analysis, and more clearly about the religious character assemblies to which it spoke direct to the corresponding language.

THE SAMPLE OF ARTICLE ABOUT CONTENT ANALYSIS.

The lying game

Don’t write off David Irving just yet – he’s seen this all before
The David Irving libel trial: special report

• Richard Ingrams
• The Observer,
• Sunday April 16 2000
• Article history

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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday April 16 2000. It was last updated at 23:23 on April 15 2000.

After a lengthy High Court libel action culminating in a massive five-figure award of damages, the judge made a devastating attack on the historian David Irving, whom he described as ‘a slippery and fly character’. In spite of everything, Irving announced his intention of lodging an appeal.

That was 30 years ago when Irving was found to have libelled Captain John Broome RN in his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17. Anyone like myself who remembers not only that action but other similar episodes – such as that surrounding General Sikorski (when Irving helped to promote the absurd idea that Winston Churchill had ordered the murder of the Polish wartime leader), or the Hitler diaries (revealed by Irving in quick succession to be fake and then genuine) – must find it strange that Irving is still considered to be a man with a reputation to lose.

‘Journalists are supposed to be slapdash,’ wrote the late A.J.P. Taylor, ‘academics to be cautious scholars. I do not think this distinction has any validation.’ Even in these degenerate days I doubt very much with a record like his whether any newspaper editor would touch David Irving with a bargepole. For a start, the risk of expensive libel damages would deter them.

Fellow historians, however, are even now, after all that has happened, still prepared to put in a good word for him. Sir John Keegan, the Daily Telegraph’s military historian, seemed to value Irving higher than his victorious opponent in the recent libel action, Professor Deborah Lipstadt. Lipstadt was boring but Irving, he wrote, ‘has many of the qualities of the most creative historians’. He ’still has much that is interesting to tell us’. Professor D.C. Watt seemed to think Irving had somehow done us all a good turn by questioning the reality of the Holocaust. ‘The truth,’ he concluded mysteriously, ‘needs an Irving’s challenges to keep it alive.’

In the light of such tributes, anyone who naively thinks that David Irving has somehow been finished off by last week’s libel verdict should think again. Journalists may damn him but the professors, the so called ‘experts’, will help to keep the flame burning. We need a liar; it seems, to help to lead us to the truth.

Greedy bankers

Along with most business operators, the Government has discovered how much money you can save by paying or charging people directly via their bank accounts.

I predict that sooner or later we will be told that we have to pay more for, say, our annual TV license, if we refuse to pay by direct debit and insist on sending an old-fashioned cheque.

Meanwhile, small post offices are in a state of crisis because the Government want to stop them paying out cash benefits to pensioners and others because, they say, it will be easier and cheaper to pay them directly into their bank accounts.

The trouble with this argument is that it coincides with the news that Barclays Bank, for one, is busy closing down its branches all over the country, leaving people, especially in rural areas, without any kind of banking facility. So the real possibility exists that many of these people will eventually be left with neither post office nor bank.

It is pointless for critics to rail against Barclays Bank for their anti-social behavior, as if bankers had some kind of obligation to the community as a whole. The object of banks is to enrich themselves by whatever means possible – and to hell with the well-being of the punters.

In the old days when greedy capitalists failed to provide for the needs of the public, the Government would be urged to step in and do something about it by, for example, providing its own bank or at least allowing the Post Office to expand its operation to include banking. Such a solution, however, would smack of socialism – and we don’t want anything like that again, do we?

Funny old world

When I had to launch the Oldie magazine some years ago, I remember being interviewed by Canadian television about my attitude to old people and what we termed the youth culture. Afterwards the interviewer told me that I wouldn’t be able to talk gaily, as I had done, about oldies if I had been in Canada. Old was now considered to be a dirty word there, like blind or fat. The old folks were nowadays referred to in public as ‘mature Canadians’.

It is a general rule that any ludicrous idea thought up by Americans (or Canadians for that matter) sooner or later will be adopted on this side of the Atlantic.

We are not yet faced with a Fattist Rights movement but that may only be because we don’t have anything like the number of serious fatties that they have in America.

With oldies, however, changes are already afoot. Mr Alistair Darling is about to be appointed by Mr Blair as a Minister for the over-50s and it has simultaneously been reported that civil servants are even now trying to ‘rebrand’ the old with a new name that will appeal to younger people. Outsiders too have been invited to come up with suggestions.

But the Government, of all people, ought to know that you cannot alter the public’s perceptions just by changing a name. If the youth despise the oldies they will go on despising them even if they are taught to call them senior citizens or ‘mature English persons.’

Some time ago, faced with the bad image of Windscale, the nuclear re-processing plant in Cumbria, they changed its name to Sellafield and hoped that no-one would notice. But now Sellafield is just as dirty a word as Windscale ever was.

REFENRENCE

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/apr/16/irving.comment

http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/teaching/av1000/textanalysis/method.html