Dictionaries are unpredictable  

Oleh:

Amritavalli, R.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: ELT Journal = English Language Teaching Journal (Full Text) vol. 53 no. 4 (Oct. 1999), page 262-269.
Fulltext: 1999.4.262.full.pdf (459.78KB)

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/ELT/53 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

Lihat Detail Induk

Isi artikel

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.

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