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Articles |
Dictionaries are unpredictable
Professor in the Department of Radio and Television, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India. She scripts and produces English language teaching programmes for children and young adults. Amritavalli, who has a PhD in Linguistics from Simon Fraser University, Canada, is interested in first and second language acquisition, and more generally in cognition and perception, and syntax and semantics. E-mail: amrit{at}ciefl.ernet.in
Common sense suggests that definitions in dictionaries for speakers of English as a foreign or other language should not be more difficult than the words they define. This article reveals typical problems of syntactic complexity, idiomaticity, and cultural specificity that inappropriate explanations and examples may pose for learners. In so doing, it also reflects the relative effectiveness of some learners' dictionaries.
Corpus-based ‘genuine’ examples are argued to be incomprehensible as well as inauthentic for learners. A comparison of published dictionaries with the functioning of a live, on-line dictionary (in the person of the teacher in the classroom) suggests that the detailed and painstaking explanation of word meaning must yield to the ‘telling’ example, where a ‘telling’ example is characterized by concreteness, cultural familiarity, and simplicity of structure.