The Effectiveness of Dictionary Examples in Decoding: The Case of Kuwaiti Learners of English

H Al-Ajmi

doi:10.4314/lex.v18i1.47240

Abstract

This study tries to shed light on the role of dictionary examples in the comprehension of word meanings. An experimental procedure has been devised whereby two groups of students with English as major subject at Kuwait University were asked to provide the Arabic equivalents for ten English headwords. The first group was given a list of entries for these words copied from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) while the second group had to read the same list but without illustrative examples. Results indicate that the students' decoding performance was negatively affected by the presence of illustrative examples in the dictionary entry. Keywords: ARABIC, BILINGUAL DICTIONARY, COMPREHENSION, EFL DICTIONARY, ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE, MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY, TRANSLATION

Highlights

Verbal illustrations have always been considered an essential component of dictionary entries and a criterion by which metalexicographers and reviewers evaluate dictionaries
* This article is a revised version of a paper 'The Effectiveness of EFL Dictionary Examples in Kuwaiti Learners' Comprehension of Entry Words' presented at the Thirteenth International Symposium on Lexicography, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 3–5 May 2007
A detailed description classifying the functions of illustrative examples into active and passive functions has been provided by Drysdale (1987: 218): to supplement information in a definition, to show the entry word in context, to distinguish one meaning from another, to illustrate grammatical patterns, to show other typical collocations and to indicate appropriate registers or stylistic levels

Summary

Introduction

Verbal illustrations have always been considered an essential component of dictionary entries and a criterion by which metalexicographers and reviewers evaluate dictionaries. In 1993 Laufer performed another experiment to discover the effect of dictionary definitions and examples on the use, comprehension and translation of new L2 words by 43 first-year students at the Hebrew University. A more recent study (Al-Bader 2007) tested Kuwait University students using four EFL dictionaries to verify the effectiveness of definitions only versus definitions plus examples.

Results

Conclusion