This paper reports on a qualitative study of dictionary use at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, during which nine students were given look-up tasks with the ...online Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary. The study employed a combination of research methods: semi-structured oral interviews and the researchers' direct observation of the participants as they looked up words. As the students completed these tasks, they were observed and questioned about their habits of dictionary use, their lookup experience, and their perceptions of the utility and quality of the dictionary definitions and examples. The results provide insight into the efficacy of the specific dictionary used. In addition, the study reveals much about how these students regard dictionaries and how they approach their use. Many of the participants had no relationship with dictionaries and no real understanding of their purpose. Their comments demonstrate that they are "demanding" users with very firm ideas and high expectations about the type of information they wish to receive in an online dictionary - and how they prefer to have it delivered. Some recommendations are made for those involved in learner lexicography concerning the improvement of part-of-speech information to make lookup easier, improvement of dictionary examples and improvement of the way dictionary information is presented. This paper also discusses what the takeaways are for concerned dictionary makers; in particular, it will reflect on how students should be taught about dictionaries today - if we still want them to use dictionaries tomorrow.
The Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) is a valuable resource for EAP teachers and students as it identifies potential lexical learning/teaching targets. This study enhances the ...AVL's pedagogical usefulness by identifying polysemous lemmas in it. Polysemous AVL lemmas are operationalised as those with more than one definition in two lexicographic resources, the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners' Dictionary and WordNet. This study also examines a theoretical issue, the relationship between the number of meaning senses of AVL lemmas and their frequency in an academic-English corpus. To this end, correlations were calculated between the numbers of AVL lemmas' meaning definitions listed in both lexicographic resources and their frequency in the COCA-Academic corpus. 34.38% of the 2673 AVL lemmas included in both lexicographic resources, excluding homonyms, are polysemous. Most (66.05%) come from the most frequent 1000 AVL lemmas. The number of meaning definitions of AVL lemmas and their frequency are positively correlated. This correlation is non-linear, i.e., low-frequency words tend to be monosemous but beyond a frequency threshold, word definitions increase as word frequency increases. Implications for future research and teaching are discussed.
·We examined polysemy in the Academic Vocabulary List using the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners' Dictionary and WordNet·AVL lemma frequency in COCA-Academic and dictionary definitions are positively correlated·919 (34.38%) of the 2673 AVL lemmas shared between the two lexicographic resources are polysemous·607 (65.05%) of polysemous AVL lemmas are in the most frequent 1000 AVL lemmas·The list of polysemous AVL lemmas is provided
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The aim of the report is twofold. First, the learning tools available in monolingual online dictionaries for learners of English are described. Second, an evaluation of the usefulness of the learning ...tools in online dictionaries is provided. To meet the aims of the present contribution, a survey was administered on 318 Polish students of English. The respondents, who participated in a lecture devoted to the topic of learning tools in online dictionaries, were instructed to complete a questionnaire. A mixed-question format was adopted. In the first part of the questionnaire, the participants had to rate the usefulness of the features of the Macmillan Dictionary on a semantic differential scale of 1–7. In the second part, there were two open-ended questions. The students were asked to name the most and least useful learning tools of the Macmillan Dictionary and explain their choices. The results suggest that English majors studying at a Polish university accord high priority to consulting online learning tools which give them valuable information on collocations, synonyms and semantically related words.
Definitions in English monolingual learners' dictionaries are the central focus of the paper. Metalexicographers have had a consuming interest in the following three types of definitions: analytical ...definitions (or classical definitions), full-sentence definitions (also called contextual definitions) and single-clause when-definitions. The use of when-definitions, the role of which is to define abstract nouns, has raised questions and doubts as to their efficacy on correct part of speech recognition of the definiendum, or item being defined, in light of the problems related to the substitutability of headwords and parts of definitions (lack of general category words in this definition format). By and large, existing research has substantiated the superiority of the classical definitiontype over single-clause when-definitions with respect to the accuracy of word class identification. The current experiment attempts to further delve into the subject of part of speech recognition with regard to the three aforementioned defining formats - in previous studies only data from analytical and single-clause when-definitions were collated, since contextual definitions were not included in the study design. The study was conducted on a group of 120 advanced-level Polish university students of English. The subjects were tested on their ability of correct extraction of syntactic class information and translation accuracy of abstract noun headwords as regards the three predominant definition-types in English lexicographic practice.
The Dictionnaire Universel compiled by Antoine Furetière (1690) was a disruptive work from many points of view. Its second edition (1701), realized by Henri Basnage de Beauval, in its turn was ...particularly innovative in several aspects. One of these was the attention that the lexicographer paid to the target group of the dictionary. Although the concept of the “learner’s dictionary” is quite recent, it seems clear that, in addition to working on terminology and content, Basnage de Beauval prepared his work for an audience that was faced with the challenge of learning French. In particular, comparing the first and second edition of the Dictionnaire Universel, three elements of innovation spring to mind: grammar, pronunciation, and example sentences. We use here a new digital version of the 1701 edition, prepared as part of the BasNum project and funded by the ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche), in order to examine these more closely to demonstrate that Basnage did indeed reinforce the pedagogical aspects of the Dictionnaire Universel.
Handbook on Gender and Health de Faria, Mateus Aparecido
Journal of international women's studies,
02/2021, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
According to Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, a handbook is a "book that contains instructions or advice about how to do something or the most important and useful information ...about a subject". ...the challenge of handbook is to be complete and to have (apparently) everything one can imagine about something, so that it allows its readers to feel informed about the topic discussed. The premise of this section is that health systems are not inherently relational and, therefore, their greatest challenges are also problems that arise in relation to each other. ...this part addresses the way societies produce norms and policies that guarantee rights that respect specificities such as gender, ethnicity and income. Given its breadth, it is not advisable to read it in full at once - it instead is a resource to be consulted and reflected upon related to specific topics. ...because it is a relatively extensive book, reading needs to be accompanied with critique.
Phoneme Frequencies in Slovene (Text vs. Dictionary) Kelih, Emmerich; Zörnig, Peter
Slovenski jezik (Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Znanstvenoraziskovalni center),
03/2023, Volume:
14, Issue:
14
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper Slovene phoneme frequencies from a Slovene–German learner’s dictionary are analysed. The structure of the dictionary allows the determination of phoneme frequencies on two distinct ...linguistic levels: the level of dictionary (analysis of headwords) and the level of text (example sentences, illustrating a prototypical context of a given headword). By applying various statistical significance tests it can be shown that no significant differences between the rank-frequency distributions are observable. The same holds true for testing the differences, based on the repetition rate of phoneme frequencies on the dictionary and text levels. In contrast to this, only dichotomised data (by grouping them into vowels and consonants) show a significantly different frequency behaviour. Overall it can be shown that based on the given empirical observations, the conceptual importance and relevance of the levels of dictionary vs. text for quantitative phoneme studies has to be reconsidered and critically reflected in future studies.
During the past decades, various dictionaries for foreign learners of Chinese have seen the light. Except for one picture dictionary which is almost completely ignored in the academic literature, ...none of these dictionaries has taken into account the special needs which foreigners living in China and learning Chinese may have. This contribution will discuss these needs with special focus on lemma selection. We argue that foreigners living in China, in order to meet their lexicographical needs, require additional words typically occurring in social contexts in which they often find themselves, whether or not these words have a high corpus-frequency. As a solution we therefore recommend a set of selection criteria that combines corpus frequency and context relevance. Finally, we discuss how logfiles reflecting user behaviour can be used as a new and very reliable empirical source for lemma selection for an online Chinese learner's dictionary.Op weg na Chinese aanleerderswoordeboeke vir buitelanders wat in China woon: Enkele probleme verwant aan lemmaseleksie. Gedurende die afgelope dekades het verskeie woordeboeke vir vreemdetaalleerders van Chinees verskyn. Buiten een prentewoordeboek wat byna heeltemal in die akademiese literatuur geïgnoreer is, het geeneen van hierdie woordeboeke die spesiale behoeftes wat buitelanders wat in China woon en Chinees aanleer, mag hê, in ag geneem nie. In hierdie artikel word hierdie behoeftes, met spesiale fokus op lemmaseleksie, bespreek. Ons argumenteer dat buitelanders wat in China woon, addisionele woorde benodig wat tipies voorkom in sosiale kontekste waarin hulle hulself dikwels bevind, ongeag of hierdie woorde 'n hoë korpusfrekwensie het of nie. As oplossing hiervoor beveel ons 'n stel seleksiekriteria aan wat korpusfrekwensie en konteksrelevansie kombineer. Laastens bespreek ons hoe loglêers wat gebruikersgedrag weerspieël, as 'n nuwe en baie betroubare empiriese bron vir lemmaseleksie vir 'n aanlyn Chinese aanleerderswoordeboek gebruik kan word.
The use of a dictionary stimulates the development of lexical competence; therefore, using a dictionary in class is essential. Secondary school dictionaries of Slovene do not yet exist, but there are ...a few primary school dictionaries, which are, according to our definition and to the education system in Slovenia, dictionaries for children aged 6-10. They are of a modest size and design; moreover, teachers are not familiar with them and do not use them in class. I have analysed existing Slovene primary school dictionaries and some foreign ones to determine the shortcomings that should be kept in mind and avoided when compiling a quality and modern primary school dictionary of the Slovene language. It is important that such a dictionary to be used in class as early as possible, and regularly. At the same time, society must be made aware that a dictionary is useful in all school subjects, not just in learning native and foreign languages.
Despite their diversity and complexity in structure and meaning, little research has been conducted into the systematic presentation of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in English learners' ...dictionaries (ELDs). To fill in the gap, this paper focused on the treatment of V N ADJ ASCs in the "Big Five" online ELDs against usage data. First a list of 40 target verbs was obtained using two measures of contingency (i.e., faithfulness and collostruction strength) through collostructional analysis of V N ADJ ASCs in the British National Corpus, and then the related ASCs regarding their macro- and micro-structural presentation in selected dictionaries were examined. It was found that most ELDs attach importance to ASCs, notably LDOCE, which assigns many of them the status of phrases. Nevertheless, the treatment of ASCs in current ELDs is inadequate. First, the inclusion of ASCs in most ELDs is far from sufficient. Second, in some cases, there is a mismatch between a valency pattern illustration and an illustrative example. Last but not least, most ELDs are not consistent with respect to their policy of listing and encoding ASCs, and assigning them the status of phrases. We proposed, in the framework of the usage-based construction grammar, some suggestions for optimizing the treatment of ASCs.
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