EXPLORING PARALLEL CONCORDANCING IN ENGLISH AND CHINESE

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the value of computer technology as a medium for the delivery of parallel texts in English and Chinese for language learning. An English-Chinese parallel corpus was created for use in parallel concordancing -- a technique which has been developed to respond to the desire to study language in its natural contexts of use. Specific problems of dealing with Chinese characters in concordancing are discussed. A computer program called English Chinese Parallel Concordancer was developed for this research. The operation of the program is demonstrated through screen shots. The pedagogical application of parallel concordancing in English and Chinese is illustrated through examples from some teaching and learning experiments, and the Data-Driven Learning approach is applied and explored. It is hoped that parallel concordancing in English and Chinese will become a useful and popular tool for both English and Chinese learners in their second language learning. INTRODUCTION Parallel concordancing is a tool which has been developed to respond to the desire (fuelled by linguists such as Sinclair) to study language in its natural contexts of use. It allows us to place side by side for comparison two contexts produced for a given item -- phrase, word, or morpheme -- one being a translation of the other. It has many uses in translation studies and in translation pedagogy, such as in the compilation of bilingual dictionaries. However, in the present paper it is the pedagogical value of parallel concordancing which will receive attention. The main research interest in this paper is in the use of parallel concordancing in the teaching of languages, specifically in its use as a form of consciousness-raising, of making learners aware of the differences between the target language and their own language (Rutherford, 1987). By comparing the contexts obtained for an item in one language, with the translations of the contexts in the other language, learners can see how the item is rendered according to varying contextual elements (Roussel, 1991). This can be useful pedagogically as, for example, it can help to prevent the L2 of more advanced learners from becoming fossilised and settling into the use of cognate but contextually inappropriate structures in the target language. It can help one to look at the way a given structure is used in different styles or registers, or by different age groups, or by native and foreign speakers (King, 1989). Barlow, who developed the ParaConc (Barlow, 2001) program for parallel concordancing, claims that parallel texts (texts that are translations of each other) are a promising resource for a range of research projects related to language learning. Using parallel texts, as he puts it, "allows language learners to directly investigate (perhaps in response to queries posed by the teacher) the main correspondences between particular words and structures in two languages" (Barlow, 1996a). It helps beginning learners to create an awareness for the feel of a second language and also to obtain some concrete knowledge of correspondences. It also helps advanced learners to deepen their knowledge of words and phrases: to understand not just the main meaning or most common meanings of a word, but to understand a range of meanings and to perceive how context in terms of discourse and genre provides clues to the appropriate meaning (Barlow, 1996a, 1996b). In this paper, some pedagogic applications of parallel concordancing are explored, making use of Barlow's insights and also the Data-driven Learning (DDL) approach (Johns, 1991, 1993, 1994), which will be discussed in the section "Parallel Concordancing for Lexical Learning. " To carry out parallel concordancing in English and Chinese, I constructed an English-Chinese parallel corpus and developed a software package, English Chinese Parallel Concordancer (Wang, 2000). A concordance example of the word xian4zai4 (now) is discussed in the paper, revealing an insight into different uses of the word, and how the findings can be applied in language learning. …