The Productive Use of EFL Dictionaries

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to emphasise the value of using EFL dic tionaries for production and, by presenting the linguistic difficulties which Chinese learners of English have in writing, to show how EFL lexicographers could help users still further with problems of produc tion. Since the appearance of the earliest EFL dictionaries successive improvements have been made to meet the learner's decoding and encoding needs more fully. The greatest number of EFL dictionary features have been on the production side. Chinese students have en coding problems, with particular difficulties in using the verb and article. The number concord between subject and verb, the use of structural words and the right choice between synonymous words are also areas of difficulty for them. Their errors may be interlinguistic or intralinguistic, but a monolingual learner's dictionary can only help the learner with confusion type errors. Syntactic information in a learner's dictionary can be given at least in three ways: (a) by means of pattern codes; (b) through examples; (c) through explanations in usage notes. But foreign learners use EFL dictionaries more often for decoding than for encoding, and much needs to be done to help them to use syntactic information to fuller advantage.