Analysing and teaching meaning (3)

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Analysing and teaching meaning (3)

• SSIS Lazio - Lesson 3
• prof. Hugo Bowles
• January 2007

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Lesson 3 - part 1

• Dictionaries and other resources

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The Criteria of a Dictionary

• Formal Criteria
• A list of the headwords (entries)
• Information about each headword
• Functional Criteria
• A reference work (to provide information about
  difficult technical words)
• A storeroom for a language (to find out what once
  existed and what exists today)
• A code of law (to decide whether to accept or
  reject regional, historical or social variants).

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Criteria regarding content

• Spelling
• Lexical meaning
• Word class
• Pronunciation
• Stress
• Etymology
• Collocations etc.

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The history of English Dictionaries

• 1604 A Table Alphabetical Robert Cawdrey (2,500
  words)
• 1616 English Expositor John Bullokar
• 1623 English Dictionarie Henry Cockeram
• 1656 New World of English Words Edward Phillips
• 1702 A New English Dictionary John Kersey
  (28,000 words)
• 1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary
  Nathaniel Bailey (40,000 words)

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• Dictionary of the English
• Language
• 1755
• by Samuel Johnson
• Two volumes
• 40,000 entries

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• An American Dictionary of the English Language
• 1828
• by Noah Webster
• Two volumes
• 70,000 entries

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Oxford, Longman, and Collins

• 1928 Oxford English Dictionary (12 volumes,
  15,487 pp., 252,200 entries)
• 1968 Longmans English Larousse
• 1987 Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary

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The Corpus Revolution Word-watching ? Compiling
a corpus

• Corpus A collection of written or spoken
  materials.
• The sources magazine articles, brochures,
  newspapers, lectures, sermons, broadcasts,
  chapters on novels, etc.

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The Survey of English Usage

• The first large corpus of English-language data,
  compiled in the 1960s.
• Directed by Randolph Quirk
• Based at University College London
• It consists of 1,000,000 words taken from 200
  texts of spoken and written materials.
• The texts were transcribed by hand and stored on
  index cards.
• In the 1970s the spoken component was made
  electronically available by Jan Svartvik of Lund
  University

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Some important corpora

• The first computerized corpus the Brown
  University Corpus of American English,
  Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in 1960s.
• The LancasterOlso/Bergen (LOB) Corpus of British
  English, in 1970s.
• CollinsBirmingham University International
  Language Database (COBUILD), in 1980s. The corpus
  reached 20 million words.
• Longman/Lancaster English Language Corpus, in
  1980s, using both American and British English,
  comprises 30 million words.
• Bank of English (Birmingham University), started
  in 1991 and reached 450 million words in 2002.

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The British National Corpus (BNC)

• A collaboration between Longman, Oxford
  University Press, Chambers Harrap (Oxford
  University Computing Service), The University of
  Lancaster, and the British Library.
• Compilation from 1991 until 1994 100 million
  words. Particular attention has been paid to the
  internal balance of the corpus.

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The International Corpus of English

• Based at the University College London
• Began in 1980s
• By 1991, 20 countries agreed to take part
• Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Caribbean, Fiji,
  Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Kenya, Malawi,
  New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Sierra Leone,
  Singapore, South Africa, Tanzania, UK, and USA.

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Types of dictionary (1)

• Standard monolingual
• Learners monolingual (usuall with pictures
  andstudy guides)
• Thesaurus

• Oxford, Longman, Chambers, Webster
• Oxford Advanced Learners, Cambridge
  International, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
  English
• Roget, Longman Lexicon

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Types of dictionary (2)

• Bilingual (with translation)
• Concept dictionaries
• Thematic dictionaries (cuture, quotations)
• Technical dictionaries

• Zanichelli, Garzanti ecc.
• Cambridge Wordroutes, Word Activators

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Dictionary formats

• Book form - pocket/full-size
• Online
• CD-ROM

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Other sources of lexical information

• Concordances
• Glossaries
• Parallel texts

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Learners dictionary - advantages

• More information
• - lexical, collocational, grammatical,
• pronunciation
• Better information
• - based on language corpora of English in
• use
• Better learning
• - written in English

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Learners dictionary - disadvantages

• No translation
• Very few technical words

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Bilingual dictionary - advantages and
disadvantages

• ADVANTAGES
• gives a quick translation
• can give a quick
• understanding

• DISADVANTAGES
• can give a quick misunderstanding
• doesnt help learning processes

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Collocation dictionaries, concordances and
glossaries

• The advantage of a collocation dictionary is to
  find collocations which are not availablee in a
  dictionary
• A concordance from a corpus can also be used to
  find collocations or new ways of expressing a
  concept
• Glossaries are compiled and used by specialists
  and are only useful for translation students
  working on advanced lexis

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Some advice

• Choose a learners dictionary which really helps
  your students lexical problems and which you
  like using as a teacher
• A good bilingual dictionary is also extremely
  useful but make sure you use it for translation
  only

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Lesson 3 - part 2

• Using resources and materials with students

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Knowing the meaning of a word - what it implies
for students

• Decoding and recognising the form
• Understanding the meaning
• Remembering the word
• Producing the word
• Using the word

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1. Decoding and recognising the form

• Read and relate written form to spoken form
• Listen to and identify a word
• Morphological understanding of roots and affixes
  (word-formation)

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2. Understanding the meaning

• what the word refers to
• the connotation of the word
• the style and register of the word
• its discourse function

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3. Remembering the word

• Meaning (receptive)
• Form (productive)

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4. Producing the word

• Spoken form (pronunciation)
• Written form (spelling)

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5. Using the word

• Accurately (grammar, syntax)
• Appropriately (style register, collocation)

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Using a dictionary for reading

• Look at the context of the word
• Use the context to decide on the grammar of the
  word (is it a verb/noun?
• Use the context to make a hypothesis about the
  meaning
• Use the dictionary to check your hypothesis

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Using a dictionary for speaking

• Know the phonetic alphabet (i.e. you need to be
  able to produce the sound of the symbol)
• Look up the phonetic spelling of a word
• Produce the sound of the word by reading the
  phonetic spelling or by listening to/repeating
  the sound (CD/online dictionaries)
• Practice the word in isolation and in a stream of
  speech

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Post-dictionary work

• You need a system to help students record
• and remember words
• Alphabetical order
• Word maps
• Words organised by topics
• Different types of list (idioms, phonetic lists
  of words with same sound)
• Lists with translations

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Dictionaries

• See the list and analysis of dictionaries and
  software in the article on lexicography