E-Concordance: A Blended Learning Practice for Teaching Oriental Languages & Literature

Abstract

Concordance is a search tool giving list of all the words along with text in which they are used by an author in a published work Both printed and electric concordances of certain holy books such as Bible, Quran, or renowned literary works like that of Shakespeare's in English, or of Rumi's in Persian and Iqbal in Urdu etc. are prepared. Concordance is usually used to get comparatively quicker access to a certain published content to study the literary style of that very author. It is experienced that this tool can be effectively useful to teach language as well. This study is made to assess the effectiveness and challenges of using e-concordance as a research tool to teach oriental languages and literature. This study is limited to the concordances of Allama Iqbal's poetic works in Persian and Urdu languages only. Both electronic and printed concordances of both the Persian and Urdu poetic works of Allama Iqbal are available. It has been observed that printed concordances are found comparatively more effective in terms of accuracy of results than that of e-concordance. A serious focus is recommended to develop both printed and e-concordances of more and more published classical and modern work.