Dictionaries were once thought of only as a printed reference work. However, from around 1990, English dictionaries for learners became available on portable electronic devices, CD/DVD-ROMs, and the internet. These days, dictionary apps are easily accessible on smartphones. In this article, I will explore the impact of digitalization on how information is presented in dictionaries. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Learners’ Dictionary
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary – Now and then
In 2020, the 10th edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, or OALD, was published. The origin of this dictionary can be traced back to the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED), the world’s first fully-fledged English-English dictionary for English language learners. ISED was edited by A. S. Hornby and others, who were invited from the United Kingdom to engage in English education in Japan, and was published by Kaitakusha in 1942. 2022 marked the 80th anniversary of the ISED. During that time, as English was established as the international language of communication, the rivalry between different publishers, together with the development of (applied) linguistics and lexicography, has contributed to the ongoing evolution of monolingual dictionaries for language learners. Continue reading
#IATEFL – Pronunciation to Go: learning to learn from the dictionary
Mark Hancock, co-author of the English Result series introduces his forthcoming IATEFL talk on the keys to developing students’ use of dictionaries and important features that can support independent learning.
Proverbial wisdom tells us that if you give someone a fish, they can eat for a day, but if you teach someone to fish, they can eat for a lifetime. It’s a message about the long-term value of learning new skills and becoming independent. A similar thing could be said about pronunciation and dictionaries. Each time you teach a learner to pronounce a word, their English benefits a little, but they remain dependent on you. If, however, you can show your learners how to teach themselves the pronunciation of a word using the dictionary, they can improve their own English independently for ever more.
The dictionary is an immense resource, containing information about all the English words a learner is ever likely to need. In learners’ dictionaries, pronunciation information has traditionally been provided using phonemic symbols based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Nowadays, however, with the advent of online dictionaries, there are also recordings of all the headwords, accessible at the click of an icon – a wonderful resource.
It is well worth helping your learners get familiar with the IPA symbols, even though there is now an audio option. It’s a great learning investment for the following reasons:
– A knowledge of the phonemic symbols enables you to ‘see inside’ the pronunciation of the word, like an x-ray. You can see exactly what sounds are in there – and what sounds are not. Furthermore, these x-rays help you to see similarities and differences between words. For instance, your student may not be able to hear the difference between hit and heat, but they will definitely be able to see that the transcription is different.
– The ear is not always a reliable source of information. You can hear the word calm, for instance, and believe that you are hearing an L because it’s there in the spelling. When you see in the phonetic transcription that there’s no /l/, it makes it official somehow.
– The audio recording is only the voice of one person at one time. You don’t know which features of their pronunciation are essential and which are just one-off idiosyncrasies. For example, if the speaker places a glottal stop after the /k/ in document, the learner doesn’t know if this is a feature that they need to copy, or just a feature of that individual’s speech. The transcription shows it not to be essential.
If you can help your learners to be comfortable in the company of phonemic symbols, you are doing them a lasting service, because it will give them a more complete access to the information in the dictionary. It’s not that they have to memorize all the symbols – many dictionaries have a running footer across all the pages with a key to them. So it’s just a case of them getting to know the symbols little by little, as they use them.
Stress information is also provided in the transcription, by a vertical dash like an apostrophe. This is superscript for primary stress and subscript for secondary stress. If a dictionary entry does not have a transcription of its own, then these stress marks are shown in the headword itself. It’s very important for learners to become familiar with this method of marking stress.
The dictionary also provides stress information beyond single word level, for compound words, phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions. Compare, for example, the different stress patterns in the following pairs:
compound nouns: ‘roller blind – ve”netian ‘blind
phrasal verbs: “look ‘on (observe) – ‘look on (regard as)
idiomatic expressions: ‘one of these days – one of those ‘days.
Due to the limitations of the WordPress editor, we cannot display the stress markings correctly. The single mark should be subscript (secondary stress) and the double one should be superscript, but single (primary stress).
Encourage your learners to look out for these stress markings, and try reading out loud the example sentences in the dictionary using the stress as indicated.
We do of course need to recognize the limitations of dictionaries for pronunciation work at the level of connected speech. Dictionaries, by their nature, are more focused at word-level features. However, the 9th edition of the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (OALD9) does take a step towards remedying this situation by providing pronunciation guidance for common spoken functional exponents. For instance, under the headword invite, there’s a box of exponents for inviting and responding to invitations, along with recordings of these, and even a short video of an interaction. The OALD9 also includes videos of students giving model answers in some typical speaking exam scenarios, and these exemplify some of the prosodic features of longer stretches of speech.
Making the Most of Dictionaries
In this article, Margaret Deuter, a managing editor in the ELT dictionaries department at Oxford University Press, looks at why proper use of dictionaries is so important to English language learners.
It’s not the stuff of spy novels, editing dictionaries. But some teachers act as if we were producing some subversive material that should be handled with extreme care.
It’s depressing for those of us who work to make dictionaries useful resources for learners to go to conferences and hear teacher trainers telling their audiences that dictionaries should be kept out of the classroom. Or to read in a coursebook multiple strategies for getting students to guess the meanings of words and only as a last resort to look them up in a dictionary.
We all know that using a dictionary badly can lead to hilarious results – well, not so funny if as a student you get a really bad mark because of it; but funny, for example, to visitors at this hotel where in the restaurant, “regional and international courts are offered to winter garden…In the summer a terrace to the decree”.
It’s quite possible that these errors have come about by inexpert use of a dictionary, but if the choice is a) ban dictionaries or b) teach students to use them properly, surely there is a clear pedagogical answer. Equipping students with the skills to help themselves is just as much part of a language teacher’s job as imparting knowledge of irregular verbs or practising pronunciation. If these skills are not taught in the classroom, students will still use dictionaries at home, but they won’t be as efficient or proficient at using them as if the dictionary is a regular part of what happens in the classroom.
Tasks designed specifically to familiarize students with dictionaries and to build their reference skills are available to accompany learners’ dictionaries. Even better, allowing the dictionary to take the strain when you’re doing vocabulary work in class, whether it’s by topic, or based on reading, or just items that crop up in the lesson, is not undermining the teacher, but sharing the burden – with the added benefit of helping the student to cope independently.
You know how it is when you have a special visitor who doesn’t come very often – you go to a lot of trouble over their visit and it’s very hard work. And then there are those visitors who pop in so often that they’re like part of the family – they roll their sleeves up and help with the washing up and they know where the cutlery drawer is because they come so often.
If the dictionary is like the first guest, making a special star appearance and then never turning up again, it will have made it hard work for you and been of only limited benefit to the students. But if it’s like the second type, the friend that is always popping in and out, and making themselves useful, helping with all the routine tasks, it’s not taking up your time unnecessarily; in fact, it’s sharing the burden with you and certainly helping your students.
To find ideas and activities for making the most of dictionaries visit our Dictionaries hub.
