Learners’ dictionaries [Archives:2007/1046/Education]

Arif Ahmed Al-Ahdal,
MA Participant, CIEFL, Hyderabad, India
Dictionaries in general are of immense help/importance to learners, teachers and scholars /researchers. The focus of the present essay, however, is on learners' dictionaries with reference to learners of English. One may well ask: What is a learner's dictionary? How different is it from a native speaker's dictionary?

In fact, learners' dictionaries are different from native speakers' dictionaries in the way they are written and the types of information they contain. Most native speakers' dictionaries are presented in order of historical occurrence and include archaic meanings. Moreover, etymology is indicated in them and if quotations are given they are introduced to illustrate historical development of literary usage. All learners' dictionaries, however, cover only 'contemporary ' or 'current' English & may include a few archaic words. Their entries are arranged with the most common meanings first and example sentences are given to illustrate usage. Yet there is no mention of etymological information in learners' dictionaries. Unlike native speakers, learners are assumed to use their dictionaries more productively, for encoding (especially writing) as well as decoding (Bejoint 1981:216). For this reason they are semantic, syntactic & phonological. That is, in addition to meanings they include comprehensive information about usage and pronunciation.

Some of the currently popular learners' dictionaries are Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (CCEP). These dictionaries have special features. They explain the meaning of words i.e. in monolingual dictionaries the meaning are explained using a limited number of words called a 'defining vocabulary'; in bilingual dictionaries the translations are up-to-date and accurate and there are also illustrations of many items that may be difficult to explain precisely in simple words. They show how words are pronounced & where to put word stress in compounds, phrasal verbs and idioms. They give full information about the grammar of a word (its part of speech, whether a noun is countable or uncountable, whether a verb is transitive or intransitive, regular or irregular, whether an adjective can be used before a noun and after' be', its comparative & superlative & phrasal verbs. Moreover, they give information about how a word or phrase is used and whether it is formal, informal, slang etc, to help learners use them in appropriate contexts; they also help in building the learners' vocabulary by giving synonyms, antonyms /opposites, derivatives, groups of words through illustrations.

The new editions of the said dictionaries represent both spoken and written English, unlike earlier dictionaries which tend to focus on the written rather than the spoken use of the language. Thus it is worth mentioning that learners' dictionaries are clear and easy for readers in general and learners in particular to use and understand.
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