People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research
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45 efficient dictionary use to aid their reading comprehension . Based on Goyette’s description (1995, pp . 22-24), Scholfield’s procedures of using the dictionary to retrieve meaning are as follows : First, the reader must identify the word or words to be looked up; this may not be an easy task if the word is part of a syntagm (phrase); Scholfield gives as example, “the baby cut a molar,” where “molar” may be unknown, but this specialized meaning of “cut” may also be unknown (p . 186) . Secondly, any inflectional information must be removed from the word . The problem of suppletion (inflectional irregularity) in languages such as French or Spanish may make this step particularly problematic, requiring readers to possess large stores of syntactic and grammatical knowledge to enable them to retrieve from memory the simplest or base form of the unknown word in order to look it up . In French, remembering that the base form of the verb savoir (to know) can appear as su, sais, savais, saura as well as sachant, sachent, etc . , may make its retrieval problematic for the second-language reader . The third step is the actual process of looking up the word in the alphabetic listing in the dictionary . The fourth step takes place if no main entry has been found for the unknown word . In such a case, a series of procedures is initiated (a) to look up the different elements of a set phrase or idiom, (b) to remove the suffix and look up the stem, or (c) to search nearby entries if the word appears to have an irregular 46 inflection . As in step two, the irregular lexical surface structures encountered in reading in a highly inflected second language may cause faulty or unproductive dictionary searches . The fifth step explains how polysemous words (words with multiple meanings) and homographs (different words with the same spelling) must be reduced by using part of speech (e . g . , noun, verb), stylistic (e . g . , technical), and/or pronunciation information (e . g . , polish and Polish) . However, in second-language reading, the pronunciation of the word may not be known, which makes such information useless . Inferring the appropriate meaning from part of speech and grammatical information provided by these dictionary abbreviations requires practice and skill . Dictionary abbreviations may be problematic, especially across languages, since similar concepts may have different abbreviations, while the same abbreviation may stand for totally different concepts . For example, to mark an obsolete meaning, the Webster uses the abbreviation obs while Le Petit Robert uses vx (vieux, archaïsme); on the other hand, the abbreviation ab (about in the Webster) closely resembles (in form only) the French abbreviation ab (d') (d'abord in Le Petit Robert); mil stands for military while mil stands for milieu . These dictionary abbreviations may add a level of difficulty for those who are novice in dictionary usage . Readers may select the first word sense listed in a dictionary definition thinking that the meaning it represents is the most frequent for that word; however, 47 not all dictionaries list word senses by frequency; thus, Scholfield advises readers to scan all the meanings of a word before choosing the most likely one . Context may also be used to select the appropriate word sense . By a process of elimination, possible word senses are compared to inferences made about the unknown word to reduce the meaning to one (which, as Scholfield points out, could still be inappropriate) . The sixth step involves understanding the definition of the word and integrating it into the context of the text . Understanding the definition may entail further dictionary searches as unfamiliar words in the definition must in turn be looked up . Words defined using new or unfamiliar terms are especially likely to occur in second-language dictionary usage (Hammerly, 1979) . Familiarity with the way hyponyms (superordinates) are used in dictionaries to classify words, as well as the special ‘dictionary’ vocabulary are also needed . To complete the process of looking up a word (the seventh step), it is suggested that if none of the available meanings fit, readers try to infer the correct meaning from the dictionary senses provided . If several meanings fit, readers should try to find contextual indices to further reduce the various senses . These techniques of disambiguation "require sophisticated skills of inference" (Scholfield, 1982, p . 193) . 48 2 . 4 . Variety of Dictionary Use Topics Dolezal and McCreary (as cited in McCreary & Dolezal, 1999, p . 110) published an annotated bibliography of the 178 studies on dictionary use in the last thirty-seven years, and divided them into five categories : (a) experiential studies, 73 in total; (b) comparative studies, 29 in total; (c) users’ needs and skills surveys, 26 in total; (d) cultural articles, 12 in total; and (e) experimental research, 36 in total . While McCreary and Dolezal’s categorization considered mainly the methods, Hartmann (1987, p . 12) concentrated on the dictionary users and categorized the studies by theme including : (a) the most important types of linguistic information sought by dictionary users (“dictionary typology”); (b) their assumptions and expectations in resorting to the dictionary (“user typology”); (c) the reference needs of the users (“needs typology”) ; and (d) the training of the users’ reference skills (“skills typology”) . These four themes could be incorporated under “users’ needs and skills” in McCreary and Dolezal’s categorization . In addition, Tono (2001) put together a more exhaustive list of research areas based on Hulstijn and Atkins’s (1998) summary : History of dictionary use The functions of the dictionary Dictionary typology Yüklə 4,04 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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