Learner's Dictionary Research Articles

Phraseological competence in IELTS academic writing task 2: A study of Indian test-takers’ perceptions and use

Studies on phraseological competence have attracted researchers from different fields, particularly TESOL. However, rarely have scholars in the field studied IELTS candidates. This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates’ perceptions of Phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted, and their types were identified based on Moon’s (2019) typology. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine IELTS candidates. The results indicated that simple formulae were the most commonly used phraseological units in IELTS writing task 2. Using inductive thematic and summative content analyses, the interview data also demonstrated that IELTS candidates had varying perceptions of phraseological competence, wherein higher band score candidates appeared to have a deeper and more accurate understanding of the concept. As for the candidates’ perceived phraseological competence, they were found to under-or overestimate their own competence at using phraseology. The findings of the study can be employed in making learner dictionaries based on the phraseologies used in IELTS.

Learners’ dictionaries and an English cultural keyword

Among culture-bound vocabulary items, we typically find names of realia, but also lexemes not immediately identifiable as such, but which are perhaps even more important as indications of culture specificity: words that reflect the ways of thinking and acting deemed appropriate in a given cultural milieu. This paper deals with one such item, which, according to Anna Wierzbicka (2006, 2014), is an essential component of Anglo values: the adjective fair in its moral sense. The analysis is meant to establish how successful dictionaries for learners of English are in rendering its nuances of meaning.

An Assessment of Major Factors Contributing towards Choosing Alternate Healers (Hakeem, Dispenser, Spiritual Healer) over Registered Medical Practitioner (RMP)

Background: Malpractice is characterized as "careless, unsuitable, or illegal activity while performing a professional task" by Oxford Learner's Dictionaries (1). Prevalence of alternate healers is a problem of nearly all less economically underdeveloped countries. Pakistan is also one of the victims of malpractice. Factors that contribute to malpractice are proximity, affordable fee, availability, family pressure, and the strong opinion of the community. The objective of the study was to analyze why people choose alternate healers and to evaluate the misconception and myths regarding registered medical practitioners. Methods: A Descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample size of 319 with participants from Gujranwala’s rural and urban areas in 2021. Both the male and female population of Gujranwala was included. Data was entered and analyzed in SPSS version 21. Results: The socio-economic and demographic variables considerably effect the choice of health care provider. More people in rural areas visit alternate healers as compared to urban areas. Lack of information and misconceptions about physicians were also the factors effecting health seeking behavior of people. Conclusion: There is a potential to improve the health-seeking behavior and utilization of health facilities by addressing the demand side (community) factors i.e., socio-economic factors, cultural beliefs, by shutting down all unlicensed practitioners and educating the community to avoid visiting them to reduce the probability of exposure to unsafe healthcare practices.

The Perceived Impacts of a Bilingual Learner's Dictionary

Abstract This paper reports on research into teachers' perceptions of the impact of using a bilingual learner's dictionary. The research, a perceptions of impact study conducted in South Africa from March 2016 to February 2019, investigates the perceptions of teachers on the impact of the dictionary on themselves as teachers, and their perceptions of the dictionary's impact on their pupils. The findings show that teachers perceived dictionary use to have positive impacts on both the language production and language reception skills of pupils in their L2, in line with other studies. However, they also show unexpected teacher perceptions of impacts on content subjects, L1, teaching itself, and attitudes and behaviours (here called the socio-emotional), especially with regard to learning or teaching. The paper situates this research in the literature on dictionary use for production and reception in language learning, and of impact evaluation, as well as highlighting relevant aspects of the South African education system, particularly the use of English as a language of learning and teaching from an early stage. The dictionary in this study was the Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: isiXhosa and English (De Schryver and Reynolds 2014).

Engleski onlajn rečnici - pregled karakteristika tri rečnika i ispitivanje njihove podesnosti za učenike

In this paper we have scrutinized three popular monolingual English dictionaries: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the online versions of the printed Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. After the introductory part, consisting of a short overview of the general nature and importance of (online) dictionaries in the classroom, we have presented general characteristics that all observed dictionaries have in common. Following this, a more in-depth analysis of the intricacies of the three dictionaries has been given. We have studied the additional functions that each of the dictionaries has (the thesaurus, synonymous expressions, fun facts, quizzes, grammar exercises, etc.). Finally, we have established a connection between this technological innovation and the classroom itself. We have used three factors to determine the suitability and influence of each dictionary: (a) economy; (b) interactivity; (c) simplicity. Our aim was to determine the importance and effectiveness of modern technologies, so that their potential can be implemented in education. Based on the observed data, we can conclude that LDCEO and OLD (given their pedagogical purposes) are more suitable dictionaries for students of English as a foreign language on the primary and high school levels, while MWD, due to its purpose, complexity of language and other advanced features is more suitable for students on higher levels of education.

English–Georgian Parallel Corpus and Its Application in Georgian Lexicography

The Georgian language, the official language of Georgia, is the only written member of the Kartvelian language family, the indigenous language family of the Caucasus region. Georgian philology and lexicography have long-standing tradition, English–Georgian lexicography being no exception. Given the increasing use of ample electronic text corpora for lexicographical purposes, the team of Georgian lexicographers, working on the Comprehensive English–Georgian Dictionary (CEGD), subsequently the Comprehensive English–Georgian Online Dictionary (CEGOD), decided to compile an English–Georgian Parallel Corpus (EGPC). The aim of the project was to develop the methodology of building a parallel corpus of Georgian and assess its efficiency for Georgian bilingual lexi­cog­raphy. The work on the corpus is going on for over a decade. The ultimate aim is to create a standard for Georgian bilingual corpora that will be compiled in future. The article describes the content and composition of the EGPC, its structure, functionalities, search engines and so on. The article also deals with various studies conducted over years in order to assess and enhance the value, applicability and efficiency of the EGPC for the automatic or semi-auto­matic recognition, tagging and extraction of terminology, the compilation of terminological entries, as well as the entries for the English–Georgian Dictionary and those for the Georgian–English Learner's Dictionary, etc. Particular emphasis is laid upon the actual or potential applicability of the corpus for the lexi­cographical activities and for the machine translation projects. The findings of the study may be interesting for other under-resourced languages like Georgian. Keywords: parallel corpus, terminological entries, English–Georgian dictionary, Georgian–English dictionary

Improving the Compilation of English–Chinese Children's Dictionaries: A Children's Cognitive Perspective

Children's dictionaries have existed for more than one thousand years in China, and play an important role in children's learning. However, many of those produced in China are deficient in the selection of the wordlist, in exemplification, and in definition. This paper aims at improving the compilation of English–Chinese children's dictionaries (ECCDs) from a children's cognitive perspective. Children's dictionaries should not only be an abridgement or simplification of dictionaries for adults, because their target user group is immature, uninformed and untrained children. Informed by some innovations in current English learner's dictionaries, this paper proposes that the making of ECCDs needs to be improved in the following aspects. Firstly, instead of lexicographers' intuition, the selection of headwords should be based on an English corpus for Chinese children. Secondly, the words used in examples should be congruent with children's limited cognitive and learning abilities. Thirdly, a multifaceted method of explanation should be provided in order to assist children in understanding the meaning of headwords.

Differentiated Treatment of Cultural Items in Lexicographical Products: A Necessary Adaptation to the Digital Environment

The paper focuses on the lexicographical treatment of cultural objects. It argues that second-language learning requires second-culture learning and that digital technologies call for new solutions to both old and new challenges. As an example, it takes traditional Chinese musical instruments and starts with a critical analysis of their treatment in five Chinese–English dictionaries for both foreign learners and native speakers. It continues with some reflections on media convergence and its consequences for lexicography and reaches the conclusion that the one-size-fits-all dictionary must be replaced with a variety of lexicographical products on different platforms. Lexicographers' focus must therefore move from the dictionary to the database that supports these products. This leads to a discussion of equivalent and explanation types and the need to prepare four different database fields for equivalents and two for explanations. To exemplify this, the paper presents a lexicographical database with equivalents, explanations, and other types of culturally relevant items. It then uses a few examples to show how these lexicographical items stored in the database can be selectively employed on different platforms and adapted to specific user needs. The paper links directly to sound files and video clips with some of the discussed instruments. Finally, the paper provides some conclusions and perspectives for further improving the cultural dimension of learners' lexicography.

Treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners

There is little doubt that phraseology is at the heart of all language use. This paper examines the treatment of phraseology in two influential Chinese–English dictionaries and four Chinese dictionaries for learners. Two high-frequency characters, namely eat and hit, were selected due to their highly polysemous and phraseological nature, and their phraseological behaviors examined in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese. The entries in the Chinese–English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries for learners for eat and hit were examined and their dictionary records compared with the results of the previous corpus-based study. The corpus-based identification and categorization of the phraseological behaviors of eat and hit revealed that some multi-character expressions could not be covered by the terms offered by the existing taxonomy (Sag et al., 2002). Accordingly, the taxonomy was revised for the appropriate categorization of Chinese phraseology. Comparisons between corpus-based findings and entry records in Chinese–English dictionaries showed a convergence in the overall treatment of phraseology in Chinese–English dictionaries. By contrast, inconsistencies in the learners’ dictionaries were observed. It was also found that the two Chinese–English dictionaries agree with each other on the overall inclusion and exclusion of phrases. Again, we also observed many differences in the way phrases are treated between Chinese–English dictionaries and learners’ dictionaries and also among the four learners’ dictionaries. It is worth noting that hardly any of the verb-particle constructions observed in the corpus are included in the dictionaries under observation. We propose that these constructions should also be treated as phrases and the dictionaries would be more user-friendly if these phrases were not hidden in the other longer phrases, and were given the same status as the headwords. A larger corpus and sampling in the future would better characterize the taxonomy of Chinese phraseology and provide more conclusive findings.

Use of Dictionaries and Online Tools for Reading by Thai EFL Learners in a Naturalistic Setting

Dictionaries and online tools are regarded as important tools for finding out the meanings of unknown words or checking the usage of interesting words. This study investigated students' use of dictionaries and online tools in a natural setting by identifying the type of words they look up in their dictionaries and the types of dictionaries they use for the look-up. Fourteen learners from a Thai public university participated as the subjects by filling in a task record form which included the names of the dictionaries they were using, look-up words, meanings selected for the words, and their parts of speech. The look-up words were analyzed to find out the frequencies of words, parts of speech, and meanings by checking with an advanced learner dictionary. The findings show that the subjects mainly selected words that were nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They tended to choose "high frequency" for the lookups. For their convenience, subjects used either an online translation tool, 'Google Translate', or bilingual dictionaries through mobile devices. The results may help us understand EFL dictionary users' behaviors in using dictionaries and provide interesting implications for language teachers.

Lexical-Semantic Analysis of the Adjective Poor in English: Definitions, Synonyms, and Antonyms

The article introduces the lexical-semantic aspect of the adjective poor in English, its synonyms, and antonyms. The analysis featured five English dictionaries: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, Cobuild Advanced English Dictionary, The Free Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The author analyzed the lexical-semantic variants of the adjective and determined its meanings. The component analysis allocated 46 semes and sememes, which were combined into eight thematic groups: 1. People: (poor) people / a group, poverty, emaciated, not very skilful (in a particular activity), needy, humble, meek; 2. Animal: (hungry) animal; 3. Material means: having, material, possessions, mean, petty / (little) money / insufficient wealth, used of land, barren (land), unproductive (land); 4. Lack / shortage: lacking / deficient; 5. Something material: very little of the substance, (little of a particular) substance, (poor) food; 6. Resources: supply (of something specified – resources, materials), (poor) country; 7. Evaluation: bad / not good, (being of a very low) quality, (being of a very low) quantity, (being of a very low) standard, inferior / very little (in quality), inferior (in value), (less) amount, (less) rate, (less) number, little / few, (in bad) condition, not normal, less (than adequate) / scanty / inadequate, negative, small (in worth), quality; 8. Emotional attitude: exciting , pity, (deserving) sympathy, unlucky, disappointing , disagreeable, indifferent, unfavorable, no pleasure. The adjective poor appeared to have 37 synonyms and 13 antonyms.

Cultural vocabulary in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

This study aims at specifying cultural words in teaching Turkish as a foreign language according to their proficiency levels (A1/2, B1/2, and C1/2) and analyzing the difference between the proficiency levels of these cultural words in terms of their frequency. For this purpose, a cultural corpus of 112.350 tokens in total has been created based on written and oral cultural texts. In this cultural corpus, nouns and verbs in the first 2000 in terms of their frequency have been compared with nouns and verbs in the most common 2000 Turkish words, and nouns and verbs that are not in the most common 2000 Turkish words have been marked as cultural words. Then, the cultural words have been compared with the textbooks used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The proficiency levels of their English equivalents in Cambridge Learner's Dictionary and the context in which they are used in the corpus have been checked and listed according to their levels. Finally, the list has been edited according to the opinions of two experts teaching Turkish as a foreign language at university level. The differences in the frequency of cultural words according to their proficiency levels have been analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests. Findings show that there is a statistically significant difference between A1 and A2; A2 and B1; B1 and B2; C1 and C2 levels of the cultural words in terms of frequency, whereas there is no significant difference between cultural words at B2 and C1 levels in terms of frequency. In these findings, it has been seen that the most cultural words are at B1 level in terms of number and concept diversity, and it has been concluded that B1 level could be a threshold in the teaching of cultural words.

Semantic prosody and collocation: A corpus study of the near-synonyms persist and persevere

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs persist and persevere with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, reveal that persist and persevere occur with the highest frequency in academic texts and webpages, respectively. Despite similarities in cognitive meanings, the two synonyms co-select different sets of collocations. An analysis of the semantic prosody suggests that while persist tends to co-occur with words or phrases that express negative meanings related to continual unpleasant situations, the co-occurring lexical items around persevere denote strong determination and great effort in completing a difficult task. Moreover, although it is stated in a learner dictionary that persevere is used only as an intransitive verb, corpus evidence proves that this verb can also be used transitively. It is recommended that corpus data be incorporated in vocabulary instruction, alongside learner dictionaries, the former of which can provide more authentic linguistic information on collocational and grammatical patterns.

Exploring the meanings and grammatical functions of idioms in teaching Chinese as a second language

AbstractIdioms are an important part of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL), but current research on the meanings and grammatical functions of idioms is still quite weak. This study selected commonly used idioms in TCSL, extracted sentences containing these idioms from large‐scale modern Chinese corpora, and manually annotated the meaning and grammatical functions of each idiom in these sentences. It then analyzed the characteristics of the idioms in TCSL and revealed the importance of meanings and grammatical functions in idiom teaching. This study further examined the problems of the idioms in textbooks and learner's dictionaries, proposed methods and principles for setting example sentences, and introduced how to carry out idiom teaching. This research not only provides theoretical and practical references for Chinese language teachers and learners, but also helps to promote the development of textbook editing, dictionary compilation, and idiom teaching.

Investigating E-Dictionaries on Speaking Ability among University Students in Malaysia

This study investigates the use of e-dictionaries among students at a Malaysian university. By investigating this aspect of Information Communication Technology (ICT), the opinions of future educators are included and analyzed. The major findings indicate how e-dictionaries caused useful effects to student's ability in spoken form. The researchers applied quantitative method by questionnaires that were answered by 30 respondents chosen based on convenience sampling. Most of the data obtained were collected online and consist of academic articles and journals. This study mainly aimed at identifying how often, in what manner, and what types of electronic dictionaries that respondents used to practice and improve their pronunciation. It can be shown from the findings that the respondents of the research frequently made use of e-dictionaries for practicing their pronunciation, learner's dictionaries was the most favoured one. Overall, the perceptions of the students using electronic dictionaries in EFL learning are generally positive. By using e-dictionaries, learners are able to learn English language in a more convenient and meaningful term.

Enhancing the role of culture-specific constructs in Chinese (-English) dictionaries for international learners

Abstract The growing number of people learning Chinese as a second language (CSL) appears to precipitate an increasing demand for Chinese dictionaries for international learners (CDIL). However, many of these dictionaries are not accepted by Chinese learners around the world. This paper, starting with the status quo and the current challenges of the CDIL, attempts to highlight the role of culture-specific constructs (CSCs) in compiling dictionaries for learners from various perspectives. The discussion is directed to the inseparable relationship between CDIL and Chinese CSCs from the viewpoint of cultural differences, the characteristics and classification of CSCs in the light of cultural anthropology and lexicography, as well as the culture enhancement in entry-word selection and definition according to the characteristics of second language acquisition and users’ dictionary needs. Finally, based on the analysis of the CSCs extracted from the Chinese-Related English Corpus, the translational definition method and principles of the CDIL are proposed. In addition, the conceptual integration mechanism for cross-cultural memetic calque of CSCs is profiled with practical instances drawn from the Corpus.

Improving learner's dictionaries: a discussion based on an interdisciplinary approach

Learner's Lexicography has reached a high standard of quality in language description. However, it is still necessary to face an old and, at the same time, always new challenge: increasing the user-friendliness of learner's dictionaries. This work deals with how to improve learner’s dictionaries, focusing on the user profile and the user's needs. To achieve this aim, notions from Psycholinguistics, Contrastive Linguistic, Applied Linguistics, Lexicology and Cognitive Psychology were central for this research. This study covered the delimitation of the user profile and the relevance of their mother tongue and the user's learning needs in relation to their proficiency level in the foreign language. At last, I carry out a brief analysis of entries in learner's dictionaries to discuss how straightforward and user-friendly the information provided is. This work allows the conclusion that an interdisciplinary approach can improve the user-friendliness of learner's dictionaries, particularly EFL and SFL dictionaries.

Monolingual Online Dictionaries for Learners of English and the Opportunities of the Electronic Medium: A Critical Survey

Abstract Online dictionaries provide unique possibilities to both dictionary makers and users, in particular in the following areas (cf. Granger 2012: 4ff): Accessibility of data, multimedia functions, customization, hybridization, user-input and storage space. This article investigates the extent to which these opportunities have been exhausted in current online learner’s dictionaries. It demonstrates that the vast technological opportunities of the internet are only beginning to be fully exploited. While storage space, for example, is already being used effectively to provide additional example sentences and collocations, the dictionaries under investigation offer partly unsatisfactory functionality in terms of data accessibility and several other areas.

Google Dictionary: A Critical Review

In an increasingly digital world, online educational resources, apps and other technologies can serve as incredibly effective tools to facilitate both teaching and learning. One such online tool is the Google Dictionary. The dictionary, an online service of Google, is probably one of the simplest dictionaries for English learners. The definitions usually use simple words and therefore are easy to understand. In addition to the definitions, examples, pictures, and usage notes there is a separate pronunciation entry with interesting characteristics. This newly added entry provides users with pronunciation of a word in two different accents, visemes, slow playback and an option that lets Google to have feedback from the users. This review paper offers a descriptive account of the entry, along with critical evaluation including its strong points and limitations. The review concludes with some suggestions to improve the educational quality of the pronunciation entry . DOI:10.2458/azu_itlt_v8i1_nushi

La pronuncia italiana per i giovani apprendenti sloveni: che cosa ne dicono i dizionari?

The article deals with the representation of Italian pronunciation in five contemporary dictionaries for young Slovenian learners. As the use of a dictionary not only stimulates the development of lexical competence, but can also serve as a useful means for pronunciation learning, the article investigates five categories representing phonetic-phonological features in a dictionary: introduction to phonetics/phonology (e.g. a pronunciation guide), phonetic transcription, phonemes, consonant length and accent. The representation of these features in a dictionary for young learners should be clear and coherent, and in some cases a dictionary (especially a dictionary intended for the youngest users) should also featureaudio pronunciations. The five dictionaries analysed are fragmentary with regard to the pronunciation: only one dictionary includes audio recordings (although the relation between the spelling and the pronunciation remains unclear, as it does not include a pronunciation guide); two dictionaries include deficient phonological transcriptions and incomplete pronunciation guides; one dictionary contains only the Italian alphabet with corresponding phonemes, while another dictionary is without any elements that could familiarize a Slovenian learner with Italian pronunciation.