Concordance+projects-Ruth

**Concordance Program**
====A concordance, according to the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987) is, “An alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and often how it is used.” Basically, a concordance program turns text into a data base. Any work can be put into this format so a word or a word combination can be accessed. A concordance has been used for many reasons: language teaching and learning, data research and clean up, literary and linguistic scholarship, and translation. Books like the Bible have a concordance for many versions. Other works that were listed which already had a concordance were the writings of Shakespeare, early modern English language literature, and English Romantic Literature.====

Application of the Concordance Program
====One way a concordancer could be used in a classroom is to look at a work that has already been put into this format. Look for a high occurence of words and then use a thesaurous to put new words into a text. This would be good for learning synonym. Studetns could also put their own work in this format and see their over-usage of favorite words and repalce these with synonyms that might be more precise. There are free websites that allow teachers to use this program in the classroom. These can be located on the Web by typing - Concordance Program Free.====

====This might also be a good tool to teach students how to use context clues to obtain the meaning of a wrod. For example, If I want to use the word such as justification, I could look up the word ina a Biblical concordance and start reading some of the palces that it is used. Hopefully, by reading the surrounding words, I can help the student to understand this difficult concept. Paul Thorogood====