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
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