This week is our final posting. We are asked to:-

1. Discuss what is concordance in one paragraph and provide 1 url of a concordancer

2. Answer these questions:-

(i) Do we think that computer can assist us to become a better language learner. Yes elaborate why. No elaborate why.

(ii) How effective is blogging in assisting us in the followings:- 

• confidence in writing
• confidence in publishing our work
• getting ideas to write
• improving our writing skills

3. If we are going to use computer to teach language one day. Which language learning website will we recommend? Elaborate why do we recommend that website. If we dont have any recommendation and would like to develop our own website explain what, why and how.

Answers:-

1. Concordance is an alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts. It shows every contextual occurrence of a word. For example: a concordance of Shakespeare’s works.

source: http://www.answers.com/topic/concordance

We find concordance by using a concondancer. Concondancer is a type of search engine designed for language study. When we enter a word, it will looks through a large body of texts, called a corpus which means a lists of every single example of that particular word. It lets us to look at a word in a context, to see how common it is and to see the style associated with it. Such a tool is a computer-specific tool that we may not be familiar with from learning English by more traditional ways, but it is worth for us to spend some time experimenting it and get to know how to use it and harnessing its potential. In addition to show us a clear and objective picture of language use, it can helps us with words that we are unsure of, which is great use or grammatical words and probably to a lesser extent with vocabulary. We can use it to compare our usage with native speakers or other learners and once we get to know it quite well, we can use it to explore attitudes, the thought processes that lie behind the words.

source: http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/concordancer.html

I hereby share a concordancer which i’ve found in the internet.

concordancer url: http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/

2. (i) yes. it is because we can improve our language by online reading. there are many websites for us to get reading materials. the fact of people nowadays are lazy to go out bookstore or library to get a book to read, so computers are convenient for these people. all they need to do is just a click on their mouse and they can easily get what they want to read through the internet. online reading save money too. we do not need to pay for what we want to read. it is all for free.

    (ii) blogging helps us to be more confident everytime we write a new post.  it also helps our posts getting more longer everytime we write a new post . we can visit other people’s blog and get ideas to write our posts from them. comments from friends or visiters help to improve our writing skills.

3. language learning website that i recommend: http://www.languageguide.org/

this language learning website offers free sound integrated resources for learning languages with our native language. the languages that this language learning website offers us to learn includes:-

• English
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Hebrew
• Arabic
• Mandarin Chinese
• Japanese
• Vietnamese
• Hindi