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All languages contain words and
phrases that are commonly associated with other words and phrases.
For example, theory and practice, cause and effect.
These collocations, words that are commonly used together,
can be identified and studied.
If you want to identify and
learn common collocations that are used in writing about your own research field,
you need to study examples of writing specific to that field.
In this video, I will introduce a type of a freeware concordancing program,
called simple concordance program that can help
you do this in a systematic way, a concordance.
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A concordancing program searches a group of texts called a corpus for
all examples of a particular search item.
A concordance displays frequency, phraseology, and collocation.
Frequency lists are useful for
identifying the most commonly occurring words and phrases in target texts,
such a result of and this suggests that in academic writing.
A further capability of concordance program is revealing collocations.
Thus, it may be useful for
you to know that utterly occurs before different, but not before similar.
Although, the immediate left collocates of an academic writing,
are mainly nouns and comprise a narrow range of terms,
form of, terms of, case of, effect of.
A concordancing program displays the result as lines of text across the screen,
with the search term highlighted in the middle.
Results can be sorted according to what is on the left or right of the search item.
And one, two, or three words away from the search term.
And this can provide data for your language learning.
If the corpus research is specific to your research field,
you can search in this way to improve your use of discipline specific English.
This is an example of what can be learned from a conca dowsen search
of a discipline specific corpus.
Look at the simple concordance program search results obtained by searching for
the term membrane.
Using this tool,
you can easily check out the usage of a particular word in even your writing.
Let us consider, for example, the word thickness, membrane thickness.
Does this word have a plural form?
Can I use the word thicknesses?
To find out, you can do a search of the discipline-specific corpus.
The updated result is this.
Some of these usages are different from those found in everyday English,
where thickness is almost always singular.
From this example, you can get an idea of how a single concordant surge
of a discipline-specific corpus can help you identify English usages
that are specific to that discipline.
Another issue that this tool can clarify
is how many different words can the word membrane be used?
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Quite a few.
For example, it is used in noun noun phrases both of the head word
polymer membrane or as the adjective equivalent, membrane morphology and so on.
In addition,
you can also compile your own glossary of discipline-specific vocabulary.
Simple Concordance Program is a concordancing program
that is freely downloadable from the internet.
The program lets you create word lists and
search natural language text files for words, phrases, and patterns.
This program is a concordance and
word-listing programme that is able to read texts written in many languages.
There are built in alphabets for English, French, German,
Greek, Russian and probably many other languages.
This program contains an alphabetic editor that you can use to create alphabets for
any other language.
My suggestion is that you construct a corpus, meaning body in Latin, but
in this case, a specific purpose collection
of English language journal articles from your own discipline.
So that you can search for
the use of words and phrases you need in our scientific writing.
This will provide data on your desktop for your ongoing
learning of the specific English phrases and expressions used in your discipline.
To be most useful, a corpus, needs to consist of documents
from your sub discipline and of the type you're aiming to write.
For example, a useful corpus for
you would be 30 to 40 published articles in your particular field of research.
My suggestion is that the articles that you're planning to use for corpus be
selected from reputable peer-reviewed journals in the field to ensure that they
were written by authors using English as a first language or at the comparable level.
They cover a suitable range of subtopics within the field,
to give a good range of language usage.
And they cover the required range of types of writing, for
example, including or excluding review articles as desired.
In the takeaway section, you can find the instructions on how to prepare documents
for copies using various concordancing software programs.
Elena BazanovaDirector of the Language Training and Testing Center
