Great Figures, Practical Thoeries, Historical Dictionaries
—What I Learned from Chapter II
Wang Dandan
The main contents of Chatper II in English Dictionary For Foreign Learners; A History is
about Phraseology and the Learners' Dictionary, introducing the legacy of H.E. Palmer and A.S.
Hornby; the Second Interim Report on English Collocations; The Descriptive Scheme;
Phraseology in a A Grammar of English Words; Collocations and Idioms in the Idiomatic and
Syntactic English Dictionary; The Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, Volume 1;
Dictionaries of English Idioms; Dictionaries of Collocations. All the contents can be summarized
three parts: three great figures; three practical theories; three historical dictionaries. The great
figures proposed the practical theories and produced the three historical dictionaries, which set the
significant examples for the future learners’ dictionaries. The following parts are the detail
explanation of the three parts.
The three great figures are Harold E. Palmer, Michael Philip West, and A.S. Hornby, who
can be considered as the fathers of English learners’ dictionaries. Harold E. Palmer (1877-1949)
has been identified as a leading figure in the twentieth century history of English language
teaching. He is a prolific writer but one or two of his works stand out as being of special
significance. They are The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages (1917) and Principles of
Language-Study (1921). He also has a great work of linguistic description A Grammar of Spoken
English (1924). In a more narrowly applied linguistic connection Palmer’s best-known work is in
the field of lexicology, and the research he undertook at the Tokyo Institute for Research in
English Teaching (IRET) in the 1920s and 30s eventually bore fruit in major publications which
appeared in the UK after World War II, often completed by other writers. The second famous
person is Michael Philip West, who was graduated from Oxford University majoring in pedagogy
and psychology. He worked as English teacher in India after graduation and in 1926 he published
a report about “Bilingualism”, criticized Indian “filtering” educational policy and proposed the
educational thought of simplifying English. In his initiative, Carnegie Corporation organized in
New York, in 1934, the first conference to be devoted to vocabulary limitation. The conference
resulted in a close collaboration between him, Palmer, and Lawrence Faucett. In 1935 he
published NMED based on the vocabulary limitation with J.G. Endicott. In the 1930s he supported
to publish A series of word lists and New Method Readers, which laid a solid foundations for
adapting English learners’ dictionaries and easy readings. The third person is A.S. Hornby, who
entered University College London, where in 1922 he took a degree in English Language and
Literature. In 1924 he went to Japan to teach English literature and became interested in language
teaching. Under Palmer’s influence, he began to make a research on linguistics, specially
linguistic method. In 1936 he succeeded to be the chief editor of IRET Bulletin. In 1942 he
published ISED, which was called ALD1. In 1946 he founded English Language Teaching. He
had profound influence over English teaching, not only because of his contribution to language
teaching method and his foundation of ALD, but also due to his sponsoring plenty of overseas
English teachers to accept advanced professional training in England through A.S. Hornby
Enducation Trust Fund.
The three theories are vocabulary limitation, teaching grammar, and collocation research. The
research on the vocabulary limitation began from the teaching needs. It had two different study
methods: one is objective quantitative approach; the other is subjective approach. The former one
was an objective statistics on the overall ‘frequency credit’ or frequency of occurrence of a given
word and its ‘range credic’. The latter stressed the personal judgment of the investigator and the
experience of teachers. In 1937 Palmer and Hornby published Thousand-Word English, which was
considered as the most useful and practical word list for adapting English reading materials.
General Service List was published by Palmer and West, and it was regarded as the most famous
and authoritative word list. Teaching grammar was mainly developed by Palmer and Hornby. In
1925 Palmer published Systematic Exercise in Sentence Building, in which patterns of the simple
sentence were presented in the form of substitution tables. These were intended to support
systematic exercises in sentence building, and looked forward to the period in the early 1930s
when Palmer would first develop a scheme of ‘construction-patterns’ that could be used in a
learner’s dictionary. In 1932 he published Some Notes on Construction-Patterns and in 1934 he
published Specimens of English Construction Patterns and he also drew a General Synoptic Chart
to indicate the syntax of English sentence. Hornby read the verb-pattern scheme designed for
ISED in the yearly conference of IRET. After making deep research on English grammar, Palmer
and Hornby applied their achievements in the compiling of dictionaries and met with great success.
Collocation research, being popular in 1920s, was initiated by Palmer in Japan and continued by
Hornby. In 1933 they issued Second Interim Report on English Collocations, which was a
milestone in the study of collocation, for it not only influenced the compiling of Englsih learners’
dictionaries but also laid the theoretical foundation for the English collocation dictionaries in
1970s and 1980s. In 1950s Ronald Mackin responded to the need of compiling specialized
collocation dictionary. In 1957 he and Cowie published Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic
English, Volume 1. In 1982 Selected English Collocations was published and in 1986 The BBI
Combinatory Dictionary of English was issued. All these dictionaries benefited the learners a lot.
Three historical dictionaries are The New Method English Dictionary, A Grammar of English
Words, Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary. The first one was published by West in 1935,
having an entirely original feature, which is that definitions were based on a ‘minimum adequate
definition vocabulary’. In the same year West also published Definition Vocabulary, a research
report describing how the vocabulary had been selected, checked and revised. The project entailed
compiling a preliminary version of the dictionary, in which a vocabulary of 1,799 words—
eventually to be reduced to 1,490—was used to define 23,898 vocabulary items. The second one
was published by Palmer, and it included a great deal of specific information on the syntax,
meaning, and phraseology of a core vocabulary of about 1,000 words, items which, until that time,
had not been given the attention they deserved in either dictionaries or grammars. There was much
to admire in the arrangement and presentation of word-combinations in GEW, which also
introduced the helpful and well-defined ‘phrase’, a class made up of word-combinations, usually
of sentence length, functioning as conversational formulae, sayings and proverbs. The third one
published by Hornby in 1942 was a general-purpose dictionary for the advanced foreign learners,
Yet it too gave great prominence to phraseology, and deserves close examination, both because it
established precedents for the subsequent treatment of word-combinations in general EFL
dictionaries and because certain of its features set a pattern for the phraseological dictionaries of
the 1970s and 1980s. And it marked a significant stage on the way to the specialized
phraseological dictionary.
Great figures created the history of English learners’ dictionaries and made essential
contribution to our foreign language learning. Without them and their great works, it is impossible
for us to have those useful helpers such as Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English,
Longman Dictionary of English Idioms, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and so on,
which benefit us so much. However, I could not know that our familiar dictionaries have such
twist history, if I did not learn this course. Now I know that the learners’ dictionaries are compiled
according to several theories and every notion in the dictionary implies the lexicographers and
compilers’ hard work. There is significance behind each sign and every example, each bold letter
and arrangement of a word and so on. Therefore, to read the introduction of each dictionary
carefully is very necessary for us to make a good use of a dictionary, which is a beneficial point
that I learn from this chapter except for the academic knowledge.
Reference
A.P. Cowie, English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. Beijng: Foreign Language
Teaching and Reseach Press﹠Oxford University Press, 2002
Richard C. Smith, The Writings of Harold E. Palmer An Overview. Tokyo: Hon-no-
Tomosha, 2nd edition, 1999.