Exercise 1

Concordancer Exercises - Getting Started

These exercises are designed for you to learn about some common problems that Hong Kong students have with their English and also to learn how to use the Web Concordancer. This means that you will be able to continue studying alone and investigating English after the EIW course is finished.

What is a Concordancer?

A Concordancer is a computer program that can search through a lot of text quickly to find all the examples of a particular word. The program will then list all of the examples of the word in the middle of the page with the sentence it is in at either side of the word.

The ELC has got an on-line Concordancer at the ELC Virtual Language Centre for you to use. It searches through a corpus of around 12 million words when you ask it to search for a word.

You will do one short activity each week.

Mini-Research Question 1:

What comes after the noun "emphasis" and what comes after the verb "emphasise"?

First go to ELC’s Virtual Language Centre at http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ and find the "Web Concordancer" in the middle of the page.

Type in the word "emphasis" in the "keyword" box. Don’t worry about the first box , which is set at "equal to" , just now. After you’ve typed in "emphasis" hit the "Go" icon.

  1. How many examples of "emphasis" did the concordancer find?

You can find this out easily by scrolling down.

  1. What preposition normally comes after the noun ‘emphasis’?

Don't worry about the first 12 examples it becomes very clear after that!

Now go back to the previous page.

  1. How many entries are there for "emphasise"?
  1. Are there any examples of "emphasise + on"?
  2. What kind of words come after "emphasise"?

This is a little bit more difficult to see. However, if we look at the first four examples we can see "a lot of team work"; "Cantonese speech"; "communist sympathies"; "ideology". What are all these? Verbs, nouns, adverbs….?

Remember to look out for the answers which will be given with the question next week!