Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries: A Critical Synthesis and a Way Forward (Dr. Dirk Siepmann,
Universität Siegen)
1. The role of monolingual learners’ dictionaries in foreign language teaching
 ‘to help students help themselves ... to help them become independent of the teacher’ (Béjoint 1989:
209)
 linguistic quality (how accurately and reliably does the dictionary portray the language?) vs. pedagogic
quality (how useful is the dictionary to the learner in various decoding and encoding tasks? how can
dictionary content be organized for maximum accessibility and comprehensibility?; cf. Swanepoel 2001:
‘functional quality’)
2. Early history (cf. Cowie 1999)
 origins: vocabulary control movement of the 1920s and 1930s
 first unabridged learner’s dictionary: Hornby’s Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942, later
to become Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary); ground-breaking innovations: distinction between
countable and uncountable nouns; detailed guidance on verb patterning
 1978: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English: controlled defining vocabulary; simpler
codification of verb patterns
3. The corpus revolution (cf. Kennedy 1998, Sinclair 1987)
 three sources of information for dictionary making: 1. existing dictionaries 2. introspection 3. the
language itself (corpora)
 today all major dictionaries are based on corpora (size: 1m words in 1980, 20m in 1985, more than 1
billion words in 2005)
 example: concordance of ‘budge’; the unit to be defined is ‘negative + budge’; possible definitions in
Cobuild style:
(a) ability: if you cannot budge something, it is stuck (b) determination: if something or someone won’t
budge or refuses to budge they reject all attempts to move them
4. User research (pedagogic quality)
 paradox: the dictionary is revered, but there is a widespread ignorance of its structure, content and
possible functions
 meaning is the information category that students look up most often, followed by syntax and
synonyms
 raises the question of how to produce easily comprehensible, helpful definitions (cf. Nesi 2000)
 one solution: folk definitions in Cobuild style (‘if you form an organization, group or company, you
start it’)
 in a study of various defining styles (Cumming et al. 1994), most students opted for folk definitions +
examples
 students’ preoccupation with meaning indicates a complete reversal of the priorities of dictionary
makers (i.e. encoding: patterning, collocation)
 but: students may have undergone insufficient training; ‘there seems little point in trying to assess the
ability of students to retrieve information of whose existence they are hardly aware or to judge their
performance of activities which they have seldom tackled’ (Cowie 1999: 187)
5. Linguistic research (linguistic quality)
 coverage of verb, noun and adjective patterns: around 40 per cent; lack of agreement between
dictionaries with respect to coverage: only 26 per cent of all patterns can be found in all learners’
dictionaries => useful patterns have gone unrecorded (Klotz 1999)
 coverage of collocation (example: Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English): lack of
three-word combinations (empty parking space) and speech formulae (Bob’s your uncle, (I’m) just being
friendly, have you seen the time, look at the time, etc.); lack of cross-referencing between synonymic
collocations (keep to / stick to / observe the speed limit)
6. Conclusions
 dictionary use has to be taught more effectively; dictionaries have to be integrated into every lesson
 more information needed on verb patterning and collocation
 future belongs to hybrid electronic dictionaries (organization by topic + alphabetical arrangement, cf.
Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM; bilingual dictionaries for major language pairs
such as Das große Oxford-Wörterbuch [Cornelsen])
Bibliography
1.
Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries
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Cambridge Dictionary of American English. 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 22001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collins COBUILD English Dictionary. 32001. London: HarperCollins
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 42004. London: Longman
Longman Dictionary of American English. A Dictionary for Learners of English. 21997. Harlow:
Addison Wesley Longman.
Macmillan English Dictionary. 2002. London: Macmillan.
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. 62000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oxford Collocations. Dictionary for Students of English. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations. 1997. Hove: LTP.
The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. A Guide to Word Combinations. 1986.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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2.
Other Works Cited
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Béjoint, H. (1989), ‘The Teaching of Dictionary Use: Present State and Future Tasks.’ In: Hausmann et
al. (eds.), Wörterbücher / Dictionaries / Dictionnaires. Ein internationales Handbuch zur
Lexikographie [...]. Erster Teilband. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 208-215.
Cumming, G. et al. (1994), ‘On-line lexical resources for language learners: assessment of some
approaches to word definition’, System 22.3: 369-77.
Cowie, A. P. (1999), English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. Clarendon Press.
Herbst, T. and K. Popp (eds.) (1999), The Perfect Learner´s Dictionary?. Tübingen.
Kennedy, G. (1998), An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. Longman.
Klotz, M. (1999), ‘Word complementation in English learners’ dictionaries – a quantitative study of
CIDE, COBUILD2, LDOCE3 and OALD5’, in Herbst&Popp (1999).
Nesi, H. (2000), The Use and Abuse of EFL Dictionaries. How learners of English as a foreign
language read and interpret dictionary entries. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Sinclair, J. (ed.) (1987), Looking up. An Account of the Cobuild Project in Lexical Computing. London
and Glasgow: Collins.
Swanepoel, P.H. (2001), ‘Dictionary Quality and Dictionary Design : A Methodology for Improving the
Functional Quality of Dictionaries’, Lexikos 11 : 160-190.
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