This is the summary of the article.Language corpus is very useful as a basic dictionary and teaching materials. The concordance software can helps on analyzing language data. Corpora often help to inform on how words and grammatical constructions are used. The benefit of using a corpus in language teaching and learning is help students to look at the systematicity of language as an interesting linguistic puzzle, rather than a set of boring rules to be memorized. The corpus are compiled by researchers at University Teknology Malaysia (UTM), University Malaya (UM), and the English of Malaysian school students or EMAS corpus by researchers from University Putra Malaysia (UPM). According to Arshad, the EMAS corpus that used in the study consists of close to half a million words. About 800 students who involved Year 5, Form1 and Form 4 students, was written data in the form of three essays. The corpus contributed by these students was considered as being above average in English Language Proficiency. The major criterion in selecting the topic for the essays was the amount of the language could elicit. The students were expected able to write more if they familiar with the topic. There are various methods that can be used to determine the development of language. One of the examples of the method is numerous language acquisition studies, which focus on specific-target structures and examine the acquisition of these structures. The development patterns can be implied by comparing the language use by three different age groups. The language productivity and vocabulary can be studying to know the developmental patterns. Language productivity of three age groups is compared in order to examine language development. This finding shows that there is increasing in cognitive maturity of older students. Older students are able to produce longer essays with more complex sentences. The diversity of the vocabulary used in a corpus can be determined by calculating the type to token ratio. According to Laufer Nation, the ratio can be calculated by dividing the number of separate words in a text (type) by the number of words in the text (token). The research signifies that the older respondents use a wider range of vocabulary in their essays. The diversity of the vocabulary continues to show increases from the lower age to higher age groups because of the uses of the wider range of vocabulary in their essays. The nature of the written text itself may partially contribute to the low ratios obtained. It still show increase from lower to higher age of groups when estimate the average number of word types per student. EMAS corpus is a learner corpus is a learner corpus that retained the students’ spelling and grammatical errors. On the other hand, the sophiscation of the vocabulary can be determined by using RANGE software, for example. RANGE is a vocabulary analysis program, which gives an indication of the kind of vocabulary used. The observation shows that the older age groups tend to use a wider rage of words, the words they use are more sophisticated. In conclusion, concordance software helps a lot on analyze the language data. These article has attempted to present the relevance of corpus data in investigating language development without having to analyze concordance.

We read a text in order to understand what it says, analyse it to discover how it says, what it says to us. Analysis focuses on the detail like individual words and phrases, patterns formed by these, the contexts required to make sense of the text as a whole. It is concerned with what we do as a matter of course when we read a text but pay little or no attention to directly. It seeks to explain our impressions, trace them back to their causes in the language, or perhaps show us that we were mistaken. Not all texts are straightforwardly about what they seem or profess to be about. People commonly say one thing but mean another because they are lying, unaware or confused, or are dealing with a subject too complex for direct treatment. Analysis may therefore uncover contrary or contradictory meanings in a text, show how a subject is being avoided or is indicated indirectly. Analysis will show how he or she manages, as it were, to speak the unsaid able. Among the most basic tools of text-analysis is the concordance.

A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. The first concordance was made in the late 12th or early 13th Century as a means of marshalling evidence from the Bible for teaching and preaching; concordances for works of secular literature followed much later. A concordance derives its power for analysis from the fact that it allows us to see every place in a text where a particular word is used, and so to detect patterns of usage and, again, to marshal evidence for an argument. Since words express ideas, themes and motifs, a concordance is highly useful in detecting patterns of meaning as well. The concordance focuses on word-forms, however not on what may be meant but what is actually said. It is an empirical tool of textual research. Concordance is one kind of rearrangement to which a researcher might wish to subject a text in order to trick out its meaning. One might wish to list all groups of contiguous words repeated in a text two or more times, or a list of the words in a text ranked in order of their frequency of occurrence, or a chart showing the distribution of specific words across a text. Such transformations of a text, and any others we might devise, are known as “text-analysis”. A simple concordance program has several features. There are selection, lemmatization, collocation, display, sorting and frequency lists.

The first feature is selection. This feature is to specify for which word(s) you want to see a concordance. There have two main possibilities which are wordlist and query. Wordlist is a possibility which a concordance program will provide a complete list of words from which to select. Monoconc, for example, lists all words in a corpus alphabetically or by frequency of occurrence. Most if not all concordance program offer a means of generating a concordance based on a query in which you specify the form you want together with optional symbols, called wildcards, to indicate any other letters. The query may also allow for proximity searching, in which you specify that you want to see a specific word-form only if it is found within a certain number of words from another word-form you specify. For example, we were interested in finding where someone is said to possess a bag, we might want to select all passages in which the word “bag” is found within 5 words of “have”, “has” or “had”. Besides proximity searching, the query allow for phrase searching in which you specify fixed sequences of words to be found, such as “in case of”.

The second feature of concordance program is Lemmatization, which to group together word-forms under a single headword or lemma. Even with a powerful query language, one cannot easily group together all the related forms of highly inflected words, such as “go”, thus “goes”, “gone”, “went”. One may also need to handle variations in spelling, such as between British and American forms, or accommodate other differences, such as between hyphenated and non-hyphenated forms. Monoconc, unfortunately, does not provide a means of grouping together words according to a common lemma. Concordance, a more sophisticated program, allows the user to create his or her own groups, thus manually to lemmatize variant forms or define a group of synonyms, e.g. “bag”, “luggage”, “back-pack”, “carry-all”.

The other feature is Collocation, which to discover what words are found in close proximity to a given word. The interest in collocation is based on the idea that meaning tends to be communicated not so much by single words as by combinations within a specified distance known as the span. The span varies by language; for English meaningful connections are likely to be found within 5 words on either side of the target-word. Thus, to cite a trivial example, the fact that “the” collocates very frequently with “bag” in a given text, especially to the left of the word, suggests quite strongly that a particular bag is the object of interest.

The next feature is Display, which on screen with option to print. The most popular and highly influential format for concordances is the KWIC or “keyword in context”, in which the target word is centred and an arbitrary amount of context give on either side. Following is an example in which the target word id centred.

The fifth feature of concordance program is sorting. The KWIC format is made much more effective if we can sort the lines according to the words that occur before and after the selected word, as well as according to the order in which the occurrences are found in the text.

The last feature is the frequency list. The frequency list is the simplest example of statistical information that may be gained by counting features of the text, then subjecting these counts to mathematical transformations. Frequency lists have been included with alphabetic concordances for a long time, even before concordances were first produced with the help of computing. The basic idea behind a frequency list is that the more frequently a word is used the more likely it is to be important to the meaning of a text and to its stylistics. A frequency list is therefore sometimes useful in detecting the basic preoccupations of a text, especially when these do not coincide with the apparent subject, and for characterising the linguistic habits of the author.

Above is the article on the application of concordance in context analysis. The word “of” is selected and all the “of” in the passage were highlight in red colour.

REFERENCES:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_(publishing)

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/concordance

3. www.concordancesoftware.co.uk

4. http://lexisnexis.com.concordance-35k-

5. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/ogi/content/abstract/26/19/4482

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KWIC

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          As compare to written communication course, blogging activity do improve my writing skill but in a different ways. Written communication course more focus on training on how to write a good essay. In written communication course, we not only learn how to write thesis statement, topic sentence, supporting detail, but also how to paraphrase sentence and summarize points in more effective ways. On the other hand, blogging has improved my knowledge on using the facility of blog by the way improve writing skill. We can express our feeling and thinking on our own blog while we can only write the fact on written communication essay. In short, I think that blogging do improve my writing skill in an informal ways of writing.

          I think that blog is a useful learning experience for me. Blogging is very different and more enjoyable than other learning method. Because of blogging can let us write down our own feeling, own thought in less formal form. I found it more effective because we can get feedback from people around the world if they leave a comment at our blog. We can also make advertising in our blog.

          To complete blogging activity successfully, I think that we need to surf the information on how to create a more interesting blog. We need to know the ways to make the blog become interesting. For example, how to put music, video, animation, link that can let others get more information and entertainment from your blog. We also need to learn how to upload photo and picture, because a picture says a thousand words!

          Next, I do face some problem while using blog. This is my first time using WordPress to create my blog, so it is quite hard to start with, because I still not familiar with the facility that exist. I have face problem like how to put music, link and even how to upload more picture on it. For others, it maybe just a little bit too easy for them. But I have known better about these facility now.

          Will I recommend to others about blogging? Yeah,I will. But I think most of my friend have better knowledge on blogging activity. For those my friends who didn’t use blog before, I think I will recommend them as a way to release their stress.

          Yeah, maybe. If I really have time, I will continue using it after SKBP is over, but I scare I will busy with my assignment and activity that I take part. But I try my best to do it! Thanks.

          As we know that information and communication technology, ICT has brought a lot of benefit in our life. The impacts of ICT are of course many and run in to many directions. ICT applications are expected to develop rapidly. Likely innovations include methodology for remote sensing and addressing individuals non-intrusively. It can also enable patients to be monitored and interacted with hundred percent of their time.

            ICT has brought positive effect towards health. One of the effect that bring through using ICT towards health is that advances in condition assessment, daily prognosis and avoidance of the development of the critical situation requiring costly emergency action, including: remote testing of blood sugars; remote monitoring of pulse rates, blood pressure and heart monitors. Besides, it is a better diabetic care with improved reliability of readings and direct action for some incidents. Direct access to blood sugar readings may improve patient’s own behavior can maintaining in good level.

            Moreover, the use of optical sensor arrays and information extraction techniques for remote, non-intrusive monitoring of physiological conditions will provide cost effective opportunities whilst minimizing trauma. In addition, through using ICT, data will reported on a regular basis, information gained in real-life situations will be much more informative and accurate.

            The negative effect that bring by using ICT towards health is that the ‘interventionalist’ effect. According to researcher, “people will learn that by monitoring a body parameter they can control something else. Perhaps the most obvious example is obesity and using Insulin to control weight, but there will be other cause and effect pairings. However, the body is a complex machine, and ‘corrective’ action will usually result in some other effect- which will need another corrective action, and so on. Instability of the body system will result and medical intervention will be necessary to return stability, or prevent death.”

           In conclusion, ICT bring a lot of impact towards health. It has brought both positive and negative impact on health.            

Reference:

http://www.asksource.info/res_library/ict.htm 

http://library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/public/adt-NWU20060712.153053/

http://www.iee.org/policy/submissions/sub732.pdf

http://openmed.hic.in/740/

http://www.tips.org.za/files/624.pdf

          In addition, there are a lot of computer programs that can help student do better in their work. It can also help to decrease the rates of student making mistakes in their writing. According to researcher (MacArthur, 2000; MacArthur, Ferretti, Okolo and Cavalier, 2001), word processors are excellent tools for students who find handwriting boring. Before that, students must know how to type and how to use computer as well. But that may lead to less quality and shorter length in writing product for who has slow typing skill. The result of writing may slower than handwriting if students cannot type fluently.

          Next, blogging activity is one of the examples that using computerized writing skill. As we know that blog is a online web page that we can express our feeling and thought. We only can post our blog while the computer is access to internet and we can post whatever we want to post including advertisements. According to Malachi Edwin Vethamani, blogging has brought interest in learners to write. Ward (2004: 8 ) said that “students are excited about writing again because the whole world is watching their word, and not just their writing teacher.” As the students keep writing, it can improve their writing skill as well. For example, http://www.wordpress.com has provided us the chance to blogging that can improve our writing skill. We can create our own blog after register an account from the web site.

         ”The Dictionary of Concise Writing” is a software that consists of two parts.First: how to identify and correct wordiness. Second: a compilation of several thousand wordy phrases followed by concise alternative expressions. We can download this software through www.e-dition.com .

          Another example of software that we can use through computerized writing is Microsoft Office. One of the functions of Microsoft Office that we can use in computerized writing is Microsoft Word because it has provided grammar and spelling checkers. It is very useful when you use it to write essay or assignment. It will have a tips of a red or green line under the word or sentence that maybe wrong in spelling or grammar when we typing through Microsoft Word. Sometimes, we need to decide ourselves whether the tips that showing is correct, we can’t just follow the tips that Microsoft Word give. Besides, we can check the meaning of the word that we not understand through e-dictionary if you have installed the dictionary software. It became more convenient than handwriting. 

          On the other hand, the book “Online Teaching and Learning in ELT” has a lot of information between online and offline writing course. It also show me that the details of differences between conventional mode and online mode. We can also know the result of performance between students on online and offline writing course based on the writer research. 

          In conclusion, we can get lot of benefit through computer assisted writing skill.