25
between the senses of polysemous words
.
.
.
.
[, and] a phrase index listing multiple-
word items under each item a learner might look up” (Kirkness, 2004, p 75)
.
By now, the newer editions of the aforementioned dictionaries must have
absolutely incorporated further changes and revisions, and should have significantly
improved regarding the quantity and quality of information, and user friendliness
.
Moreover, the recent editions of the four dictionaries are all available in CD-ROM
format and on the Internet with extra features that include native speakers’
pronunciation for each word, further grammatical and usage information, “corpus
examples, visual and audio materials, and interactive exercises and games” (Nesi,
1999, p 60)
.
In fact, MLDs are being enhanced and refined on a regular basis because
they are adapted from frequently-updated corpus data which provide an
empirically-based account of the language (Rundell, 1998)
.
Alongside the previously mentioned titles, several other MLDs have been
published
.
Currently, a wide range of MLDs are available for all levels of proficiency
.
In addition, there are many specialized dictionaries available on the market, such as
dictionaries of collocations, pronunciation, phrasal verbs and idioms
.
Besides, a
number of technical learners’ dictionaries for specific disciplines, such as business
and
computing, are also available
.
Interestingly, a recent innovation in
lexicography is
the bilingualized dictionary, which is the MLD with translations into the students’
native language
.
This type of dictionary has become increasingly available for many
languages including Arabic
.
26
In
the following section, literature related to whether dictionaries should be used in L2
learning is reviewed
.
1
.
4
.
2. Controversy over Using Dictionaries in Language Learning
Language teachers are repeatedly perplexed about the role of dictionaries in
foreign language learning and teaching, and t
he
debate of whether to use dictionaries
in the foreign language classroom has always been a lively one amongst language
teachers and lexicographers
.
Amongst many questions that can be asked about
dictionaries, one question has received the most attention
:
Which is better, looking up
an unknown word in a dictionary or simply guessing its meaning from context? Or to
put it differently
:
Do dictionaries have any notable effects on L2 learning?
1
.
4
.
2
.
1
.
Negative Attitudes towards Dictionaries
Many language teachers have often had a negative view towards using a
dictionary; they adopted the premise that dictionary use encourages laziness (the
learner should normally make the effort to guess the meaning of unknown words), or
that it distracts students’ attention away from the teacher in the classroom (Kisito,
2007), or that bilingual dictionaries would necessarily lead to unwanted thinking in
the first language
.
Because of the teachers’ negative views towards dictionary use,
they hardly ever encourage their students to use dictionaries
.
Consequently, students’
dictionary skills are often poor
.
27
In the same way, some EFL teachers do not recommend the use of dictionaries
in the belief that they do not allow students to comprehend vocabulary in context
because students overuse them at the expense of developing their self-confidence and
attempting to guess the meaning from context (Bensoussan, Sim & Weiss, 1984;
Kisito, 2007)
.
Similarly, teachers’ concerns about vocabulary learning could be
attributed to students’ using bilingual dictionaries too blindly, or from students
expecting a one-to-one correlation between their mother language and English (Stein,
1990)
.
As far as the reading fluency is concerned, teachers and educators are
concerned that students’ excessive use of dictionaries may interfere with their short-
term memory, thereby impeding their comprehension (Knight, 1994), and in this way
dictionaries can be cognitively disruptive
.
A student must know how the word is
spelled, stop reading to search for the word in an alphabetical order in the dictionary
and then read through the entries to select the appropriate connotation or sense
.
This
could obviously suspend the process of forming a cohesive connection on both
sentence and
text level
.
As a result, the constant lookup may interrupt the flow of concentration to
make reading a process of word-by-word decoding in which the whole meaning or
part of it is often missed (Summers, 1988; Scholfield, 1982)
.
Hence, Rhoder and
Huerster (2002) claimed that students may not be very motivated to stop reading each