What is 'Concord' in language teaching?

• A. Concord
• B. Meaning
• C. Stress Pattern
• D. Word Order

Answer: (A)

Concord in language teaching is about agreement between related words in a sentence, so their forms line up for person, number, and often gender or case. The most familiar example is subject-verb agreement: the verb changes to match the subject (for instance, I walk vs. he walks). This same idea applies to other parts of speech too—adjectives and determiners must agree with the nouns they describe in gender and number in many languages, and pronouns must match their antecedents.

Understanding concord helps learners form grammatically correct sentences across languages. It’s not about meaning by itself, nor about how a word is pronounced (stress patterns), nor about the overall order of words in a sentence. It’s specifically about the form of words changing to stay in harmony with related words in the sentence.