Pedagogical Dictionaries Research Articles

TEACHER’S MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS AND STUDENTS’ METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES

A b s t r a c t The aim of this research was to establish the correlation between teachers' mental characteristics and students' metacognitive strategies. Teachers'' mental characteristics were examined through: positive emotional reactions, negative emotional reactions and teachers' indifference. The issue is about the students' estimations of teachers' mental characteristics. Metacognitive strategies which are explored are: consciousness of students' own cognitive function, planning and monitoring of the same. Research was realized in two elementary schools in the area of East Sarajevo, using the sample of the seventh, eight and ninth-grade students. The results show that the emotional positive reaction is the only variable which appears as a positive predictor in realizing of all metacognitive strategies. Teachers’ mental characteristics A teacher influences not only with teaching methods and acts but also with all his/her person. It is emphasized that teacher’s mental characteristics (teacher’s person) are the most important factor in the teaching process. A good curriculum and good methods can’t replace teacher’s love and interest in pupils. Bosiljka and Jovan Djordjevic’s findings (1988) show that pupils don’t care about teacher’s didactical knowledge as much as they care about teacher’s kindness and will to help them. Evans as quoted by Laketa and Vasilijevic (2006) paid special attention to teacher’s person and concluded that the teacher has the biggest influence on pupils after parents. He also established that success of pupils in the teaching process depended on teacher’s behaviour. When exploring definitions regarding teachers’ mental characteristics, it was necessary to delimit differences in terms which exist. What Jersald (1972) called human qualities, universally human characteristics, Laketa (1998) called general human attributes, as noted by reference to the Pedagogical Dictionary (1967). In the Pedagogical Dictionary it was said that a person represents an organization of physical, mental and psycho-social characteristics. PON Inventory (PON- teacher’s mental characteristics) was constructed for the needs of exploring teachers’ mental characteristics on the base of accessed literature whose aim was to research teacher’s

User-Friendliness of Noun and Verb Coding Systems in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English: a Case of Polish Learners

User-Friendliness of Noun and Verb Coding Systems in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English: a Case of Polish Learners

A New Pedagogical Dictionary of English Collocations

A New Pedagogical Dictionary of English Collocations

Research in English language teaching and learning in Israel (2004–2009)

The goal of this article is to make research on English language teaching and learning published locally in Israel more widely available. Given that so many Israeli researchers are internationally trained and maintain wide connections, it necessarily omits much important work that appears in European and US journals. It focuses on shorter studies, commonly unfunded, that university teachers in EFL programs or in teacher training programs at smaller colleges conduct in their own time. It represents a wide range of good quality research, ‘glocal’ in that its local production does not compromise potential contributions to global concerns. The main themes treated are the early start of teaching English, the development of an integrated methodology, detailed studies of the teaching of lexicon and writing, specialized studies of dyslexia, computer-assisted instruction, English for academic purposes, and teaching Israeli students who already know some English from home or visits abroad. The overall quality of the research is high, matching all but a few top international journals.

Anna Dziemianko: User-friendliness of Verb Syntax in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English

Anna Dziemianko. User-friendliness of Verb Syntax in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English. 2006, XII + 229 pp. ISBN-13: 978-3-484-39130-7. ISBN- 10: 3-484-39130-8. Lexicographica. Series Maior 130. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Price: €124.

The Usefulness of the Definitions of Abstract Nouns in OALD7 and NODE

The paper presents a study aiming at comparing the usefulness of the definitions of abstract nouns in a pedagogical dictionary (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, OALD7) and a nativespeaker dictionary of English (The 8ew Oxford Dictionary of English, NODE). It starts with a brief description of the subclass of abstract nouns which is conceived of as a prototypicallystructured category composed of members exhibiting different degrees of resemblance to the prototype. Moreover, the most prototypical members of the subclass of abstract nouns are proposed and a comparison of the definitions of abstract nouns from the two dictionaries is made. The paper then reports on the empirical study which investigated the usefulness of the definitions of abstract nouns from the two dictionaries on a group of 60 dictionary users whose level of English oscillated between upper intermediate and advanced. Finally, the results of the study are discussed and an attempt is made to set out the possible reasons for the final outcome of the study.

The Quaternary in French secondary school: its disappearance today in light of the sociocultural stakes of its introduction during the 19th century

The Quaternary in French secondary school: its disappearance today in light of the sociocultural stakes of its introduction during the 19th century

Dziemianko, Anna. 2006. User-friendliness of Verb Syntax in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English

Dziemianko, Anna. 2006. User-friendliness of Verb Syntax in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English

Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries

Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries D! Kazuo Dohi|G. Edward Thorndike compiled a few monolingual student dictionaries for native speakers interesting from the standpoint of present-day learners' dictionaries. Among others, Thorndike influenced the pioneer learner's dictionary, Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED) (Hornby and others 1942), parent to all later learners' dictionaries, both British and American.1 Editors of some recent learners' dictionaries search corpora for evidence of frequency: for instance, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Third Edition (LDCE3) marks the 3000 most frequent words in written and spoken English by means of a code; and the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD2) marks frequency by means of diamond-shaped symbols. But whether committed to corpus research, or to representing frequency within a dictionary's text, all learners' dictionaries rely on some notion of frequency to generate their word lists, and may also consider the frequencies of grammatical constructions and word 'Chief among the British variety are The Advanced Learner's Dictionary ofCurrent English (2nd ed., 1963), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), and all subsequent editions of these works, the Cambridge InternationalDictionary ofEnglish (1995), and Harrap's Essential English Dictionary (1995); the American variety includes The Newbury House Dictionary ofAmerican English (1996) , Random House Webster's Dictionary of American English (1997), Longman Dictionary of American English, NewEdition (1997) , The American HeritageEnglish as a Second LanguageDictionary (1998), NTCs American English Learner's Dictionary (1998), and Webster's New World Basic Dictionary ofAmerican English (1998). Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Soaety ofNorth America 22 (2001) 154Kazuo Dohi meanings. The contemporary interest of such frequencies and their possible lexicographical applications stems, though often indirectly, from Thorndike's views on the relationship between word frequency and language learning, the focus of his research in educational psychology throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but most memorably expressed in his school dictionaries, published by Scott Foresman in the 1930s and 1940s. Before he began to compile pedagogical dictionaries, Thorndike compiled word books on the basis of "word count" or frequency in English literature (1921a and 1931), an enterprise he justified in "Word Knowledge in the Elementary School": How many English words should the ordinary boy or girl know the meanings of at the end of Grade 8? Which words should all or nearly all pupils know at that stage? In what grades and in what connections should they be learned? ... [0]ne notable cause of our inability to answer [these questions] correctly is our lack of knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of words in the talk our pupil and graduate should hear, and the books, articles, letters and the like which he will or should read. Just as word counts of such material as the pupil may need to write are instructive in the pedagogy of spelling, so word counts of such materials as the pupil may need to understand will be instructive in the pedagogy of reading, and indeed of all the school subjects which are presented with the aid of language. (1921b, 334) Here we see articulated for the first time some essential aspects of present -day learners' dictionaries and their forerunners. Before one can instruct someone in a language, whether native or foreign, one must determine what that speaker will most likely need to know, and at which stages of his or her learning. Thorndike had counted for ten years before publishing The Teacher's Word Book (1921a), an alphabetical list of the 10,000 words then found most frequently in written English. Further research allowed Thorndike to publish two successive enlargements of that book (1931 and 1944) .2 As has often been pointed out, the word books derive from manual word counts in a literary "corpus." For his first word 2The author was unable to obtain the original A Teacher's Word Book of Twenty Thousand Words (1931) and has been compelled to consult the corrected version (1932). He conducted his survey on the assumption that there is no substantial difference between the two issues. Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries155 book, Thorndike examined 41 standard literary texts, including the Bible and Shakespeare, as well as Bartlett'sFamiliar Quotations...

A Study of the Use of a Monolingual Pedagogical Dictionary by Learners of English Engaged in Writing

This paper is an account of a study of the role played by a dictionary (in this case, the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987)) in the completion of written (encoding) tasks by learners of English as a foreign language The study uses an introspective methodology based on the completion of flowcharts The results highlight, in particular, the importance of information on spelling and meaning and the central role accorded to the examples for obtaining a wide variety of information, notably on meaning, grammar, and register COBUILD's full-sentence definitions together with its real examples are revealed to be of considerable use to learners on the other hand, coded syntactic information in the dictionary is largely neglected by learners Implications for lexicographers and for language teaching and learning are considered