Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 13 • June 2005
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Dictionaries and productive tasks in a foreign language
Introduction
The process of
making dictionaries involves three main steps: collection, description and
presentation. The first step, the collection of data, has seen
dramatic changes over the past twenty-five years. Over more than four centuries,
from the sixteenth till well into the second half of the twentieth century,
lexicographers had to read and extract written texts and make paper slips
with quotations which were put together in huge boxes, occupying a lot of
space. Nowadays, for many languages there are text corpora containing far
more numerous and more varied materials. For the English language in
particular these corpora are easily available and they contain not so much
literary texts as was previously the case. Most of the texts are taken from
general newspapers, scientific, administrative and other more or less
specialized sources and they include more and more transcripts of radio and
television broadcasts and other types of formal and informal oral production.
For other languages these corpora may be less rich and less publicly
accessible, but many publishing houses do have corpora of several millions of
words at their disposal. At the level of the
linguistic description of the contents of these immense riches, the
last decade has seen a number of significant improvements. KWIC (Keyword in
context) software, for instance, which makes it possible to oversee the use
of a given word in various contexts, has become quite common and ever more
sophisticated during recent years. Moreover, the theoretical notions and the
practical techniques that are needed to interpret the language data are much
clearer than ten or twenty years ago. The collaboration between experienced
lexicographers like Sue Atkins and well known semanticists like Charles
Fillmore, for instance, has led to a theoretically sound and practically
effective tool that is generally known as the FrameNet approach (see International
Journal of Lexicography 16.3, September 2003). Insight has been gained
into questions concerning the distinction of senses of polysemous words, the
status of collocations, idioms and other types of chunks, and there is a much
greater awareness of the wide variety of data and phenomena covered by the
term ‘lexicon’. As to the third
field of lexicography, the presentation of the results of the
foregoing steps in a dictionary, much less progress can be reported. As a
matter of fact we still do not know what type of dictionary and what kind of
lay-out is most convenient for which users or how we must proceed in order to
improve the success rate in dictionary use, which is traditionally just above
chance level. A number of studies
have been conducted on the relative importance of monolingual, bilingual or bilingualized
dictionaries for L2 learners. The author of a recent book on this matter,
Robert Lew, has investigated this point in a highly systematic way with
Polish learners of English. Using a fine-grained design, where more than 700
learners use one of six types of dictionaries in order to find out the
meaning of a number of pseudo-English words, the author finds that the
monolingual dictionary (with English definitions only) scores far lower than
any of the other types, and that some types of dictionaries, especially those
with equivalents as well as definitions in English or Polish, tend to be less
effective, probably due to an overload of information. In his conclusion Lew
states that: ‘we must question the validity of the recommendation so popular amongst
educators of the presumed superiority of the monolingual dictionary. There is
hardly any empirical evidence available to support that supposed superiority,
and what little relevant evidence is available, points to the bilingual
dictionary as the more effective dictionary for reception. The present study
provides further evidence of this type’ (Lew 2004: 179). Another type of
research has underlined the importance of lemma structures and the use of
guide words, menus or sign posts, especially in long lemmas (Bogaards 1998).
A study concerning the relative utility and usability of grammatical
information reveals that traditional grammar codes are not used very often,
even by advanced learners with a good linguistic schooling, but that
syntactic information provided by definitions (like in Cobuild style
definitions) and even more in examples helps learners in an effective way to
write correct sentences (Bogaards and Van der Kloot 2002). Although other
studies could be cited, really relevant experimental evidence on the aspect
of presentation is nevertheless still quite scarce. As may be clear from
the examples of experimental research given above, presentation is intimately
linked to the intended users. In contrast to the formal uniformity of most
dictionaries all over the world, there probably is not one correct way of
presenting lexical data in a dictionary, one that suits all users. Ideally
there should be a fairly large number of differently designed dictionaries
from which the users could choose. Although this is not a weird idea in this
time of computer facilities and on-demand business, it is not clear how
learners could make their choice nor how teachers or dictionary compilers
could guide them in this choice. A lot of thinking and a lot of experimental
research are necessary before we can start compiling the dictionaries that
users of different types would really need. An example of dictionary use
In this paper I
would like to reflect on some aspects of the information that learners
minimally need when they have to produce a text in an L2. I will not make a
distinction between the oral or written nature of such a text, although we
all know that dictionaries are only seldom used in oral settings. In order to
simplify the situation, I will take an imaginary native speaker of French who
is a learner of English and who wants to say or write something in English
and who is prepared to look up in the dictionary the elements he does not
have at his disposal. Let us imagine that
he wants to express in English something like: Notre professeur veut qu’on écoute
bien ses conseils. The first word that
could cause a problem is professeur. We will assume that our learner
is a ‘collégien’ (a schoolboy in a secondary school) and is aware of the fact
that instructors on different levels may be called by different names, as is
the case in French. He knows the word teacher but wants to verify in a
learner’s dictionary whether this is the right choice here. He opens one of
them and finds a definition such as ‘someone whose job is to teach’ (MEDAL).
Not really satisfied, he turns to a bilingual dictionary and finds: Fig. 1: Part of the lemma professeur in the Robert &
Collins (2002) If he is brave
enough to fight his way through all the abbreviations, brackets and
parentheses, this will give him the certainty that teacher is the
right equivalent in his context. So he now can write: Our
teacher wants
But what does the
teacher want? What is the right construction to use with this verb? For
this point our ‘collégien’ goes back to the monolingual learner’s dictionary,
where he finds: Figure 2: Part of the lemma want in MacMillan English
Dictionary for Advanced Learners (MEDAL, 2002) or Figure 3: Part of the lemma want in Cambridge International
Dictionary of English (CIDE, 1995) Although all the
information that is needed can be found in each of these lemmas, it is far
from certain that our friend will be able to winkle out the right elements.
Alternatively, if he goes to the bilingual dictionary, he will be confronted
with: Figure 4: Part of the lemma vouloir in
the Robert & Collins (2002) But again it is
uncertain whether he will be any luckier with this presentation. Although
daily practice may show otherwise, let us suppose that our hero eventually
comes up with: Our teacher wants us to Let us see what
happens with the rest of the sentence. Écouter = listen, quite simple,
although the French verb is transitive (écouter quelque chose), whereas
the English verb uses a preposition (listen to something). But
what is the word for bien? Listen well? This does not sound
very familiar. MEDAL gives a list of ‘Words frequently used with listen’:
attentively, carefully, closely, hard, intently, politely, some of
which can do the job perfectly well. I know of no bilingual dictionary that
gives this type of useful information on collocations. So, if no mistakes are
made, we now have: Our teacher wants us to listen
carefully to Not knowing the word
for conseils, our ‘collégien’ fights bravely on. Only the bilingual
dictionary can bring him to the element he needs, which is advice. If
he can interpret ‘NonC’ as meaning that this word does not permit a plural,
he will finally write: Our teacher wants us to listen
carefully to his advice. Had he checked in a
learner’s dictionary, he would have found ‘noun [U]’ (MEDAL) or ‘n
[U]’ (CIDE), but, on the positive side, he would have also found a number of
examples to take advantage of. Comments
What I have tried to
make clear is that for this virtual dictionary user, the information that is
needed cannot be found in one dictionary and is not always tailored to his
needs. I am convinced that the task of the dictionary user is systematically
underestimated. Even if the information is there, there remains so much to be
interpreted and to be adapted to the context at hand that many users give up
or end up with incorrect solutions. As will be clear,
the information that was necessary for the ‘translation’ of the sentence
given above was partly available in the bilingual dictionary. As these
dictionaries have translation as their primary goal, they cannot give a full
description or a reasonable number of examples in the target language. Yes,
they present the user with the form of the element that is needed in the
other language, but in most cases they give insufficient or at best highly
coded information on how this element is to be used in the other language. In
addition, they do not normally give phonetic transcriptions of the words of
the target language at the place where these are most needed: at the right
side of the translation equivalence. At the place where these transcriptions
are now given, at the left side in the receptive dictionary, they will first
of all be helpful for those who already know the word but have to pronounce
it, e.g. for reading a text aloud. Those who want to use it for oral
production, once they have found the right element, have to make a further
step to the receptive part or volume in order to know how to pronounce it. The most serious
drawback of monolingual dictionaries of a foreign language is that the
user is often unable to retrieve the word he needs. Although more and more
techniques and tools are being created to overcome this problem (see Bogaards
2003), in many cases learners will need a bilingual access mode in order to
get at the words they need. A bilingual index to a monolingual dictionary, as
has been proposed for some types of bilingualised dictionaries, is not a
viable option. For polysemous words (and most frequent words are very
polysemous) this would create a very bad kind of bilingual list where users
need to make their choice on rather vague grounds and have then to turn to
the dictionary proper, a step that many will not make. Electronic
dictionaries can remedy this situation to a great extent. But then they
should not just be CD-ROM versions of paper dictionaries. They should be
rethought in a fundamental way. Really new results can only be expected when
such a rethinking not only takes into account the electronic opportunities
that are widely available nowadays, but, in addition, seeks to apply the
results of sound experimental research concerning the behaviour of language
learners and dictionary users in various situations and at different levels.
At Van Dale (The
References
Bogaards,
P. (1998) Scanning long entries in
learner's dictionaries, in T. Fontenelle & al. (eds.), Actes EURALEX'98 Proceedings, Liège:
Université de Liège, 555 – 563. Bogaards,
P. (2003) MEDAL: a fifth dictionary
for learners of English, International
Journal of Lexicography 16.3: 43
– 55. Bogaards, P. and M. Hannay (2004) Towards a new type
of bilingual dictionary, in G. Williams and S. Vessier (eds.), Proceedings of
the Eleventh EURALEX International Congress, Bogaards, P. and W.A. van der Kloot (2002) Verb constructions in learners’ dictionaries,
in A. Braasch, C. Povslen (eds.), Proceedings
of the Tenth EURALEX International Congress Euralex, Copenhagen 2002,
Vol. II, 747 – 757. Lew, R. (2004) Which dictionary for whom? Receptive
use of bilingual, monolingual and semi-bilingual dictionaries by Polish
learners of English. Dictionaries MacMillan
English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
(MEDAL), 2002. Robert
& Collins, 2002.
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