Tài liệu The productive use of EFL dictionaries

The Productive Use of EFL Dictionaries G. F. Huang Fudan University, Shanghai, China The aim of this paper is to emphasise the value of using EFL dictionaries for production and, by presenting the linguistic difficulties which Chinese learners of English have in writing, to show how EFL lexicographers could help users still further with problems of production. Since the appearance of the earliest EFL dictionaries successive improvements have been made to meet the learner’s decoding and encoding needs more fully. The greatest number of EFL dictionary features have been on the production side. Chinese students have encoding problems, with particular difficulties in using the verb and article. The number concord between subject and verb, the use of structural words and the right choice between synonymous words are also areas of difficulty for them. Their errors may be interlinguistic or intralinguistic, but a monolingual learner’s dictionary can only help the learner with confusion type errors. Syntactic information in a learner’s dictionary can be given at least in three ways: (a) by means of pattern codes; (b) through examples; (c) through explanations in usage notes. But foreign learners use EFL dictionaries more often for decoding than for encoding, and much needs to be done to help them to use syntactic information to fuller advantage. 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to emphasise the value of making productive use of existing English as a foreign language (EFL) dictionaries and to show in what respects EFL lexicographers could help users still further with problems of production. With regard to the latter, I shall discuss the learner’s linguistic difficulties by analysing some of the typical errors made by Chinese students in their compositions. The dictionary of a language is often characterized as &dquo;a list of all the particular facts about the language&dquo; (Leech 1981). A language such as English contains a great number of lexical items (simplexes, derivatives, compounds and idioms), and it is the function of a learner’s dictionary to list these items and provide the information (phonological, grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, etc.) which will ensure their correct and appropriate use. It is not always recognized that the EFL dictionary is both a comprehension and a production resource intended to serve as an efficient aid to foreign learners in their decoding and encoding activities. Since the appearance of the earliest EFL dictionaries, lexicographers have made successive improvements in design in an attempt 54 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 to meet both decoding and encoding needs more fully. On the comall EFL dictionaries now provide simply worded definiside, prehension tions, and some even use a controlled or limited vocabulary as a metalanguage for definition. Michael West was the first to put a special &dquo;defining vocabulary&dquo; of 1490 items to use in his New Method Dictionary (1953) and in An International Reader’s Dictionary (1965) which was derived from it. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE 1978) achieves simple definitions by using a defining vocabulary of 2000 words, which is given at the end of the dictionary in an appendix. The use of a defining vocabulary in a learner-oriented dictionary is especially helpful to those who, because of their lack of proficiency in L2 vocabulary, are still unable to use the general dictionaries designed for native speakers. On the production side, the first major step was the provision of verb patterns and the noun labels [C] (countable) and [U] (uncountable) in the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (Hornby et al. 1942), reprinted from 1952 onwards under the title The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (ALD), which has within 30 years or more passed through three editions (1952/63/74). Later dictionaries, as a rule, improve upon earlier ones in extending the range of information on the syntactic properties of headwords. Apart from giving grammatical codes for the verb, the LDOCE accords similar treatment to the adjective, the adverb and the phrasal verb and develops fresh symbols to codify other syntactic properties of the noun. More elaborate coding systems in a learner’s dictionary convey a great deal of useful productive information. Furthermore, the separate information about collocates in the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English (ODCIE, Vol. I 1975, Vol. II 1983) and the notes on usage in the LDOCE are also aimed at the user interested in language production. The learner’s dictionary, as is the case with any general dictionary to be of service to native speakers, includes &dquo;encyclopaedic&dquo; and &dquo;lexical&dquo; words, i.e. low-frequency technical terms and high- or medium-frequency everyday words, but the focus is on the treatment of those words - grammatical words and so-called &dquo;heavy duty&dquo; verbs in particular which &dquo;pose the most serious learning problems for the student&dquo; (Cowie 1983) and need to be dealt with through exemplification. Therefore, EFL lexicographers attempt to provide the most detailed guidance on syntax and collocation in entries for those high- or mediumfrequency lexical items by means of examples, including perhaps warnings or advice on pitfalls to avoid (as in the LDOCE). The EFL dictionary gives great weight to the lexicographer’s own examples, which are designed not merely to clarify the definition, but rather as a way of illustrating the syntactic features of a lexical item. compiled - 55 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 It is obvious that several of the most recent developments in EFL lexicography have been concerned with meeting the learner’s productive needs. This tendency has been even more prominent since the early 1970s (cf. Cowie 1984). That is, more and more attention has been given to the leamer’s active production the use of the right word or the appropriate - expression, the construction of a correct sentence and the ascertaining of stylistic connotations. Unfortunately, however, despite the massive amount of work done by EFL lexicographers to supply encoding information, there is considerable evidence that foreign learners use their EFL dictionaries for receptive rather than productive purposes. Native speakers use their dictionaries almost exclusively for information on the meaning of words (cf. Quirk 1973), as they take it for granted that their encoding competence is adequate. But foreign learners need enough information to help them to avoid mistakes, and possibly even to attain elegance in their use of the target language. We are faced here with a tremendous paradox: &dquo;It is for encoding that students need the most information; it is encoding information which is the most difficult to supply; and yet this is the information which students use the least&dquo; (B6joint 1981). The mocking result may be discouraging to EFL lexicographers, but the case is far from being hopeless. It is undoubtedly the case that students do not speak or write correctly and that they need dictionaries to use the language acceptably. Grammar books only give general rules while dictionaries offer specific facts about the language. We can be sure that students have individual encoding needs that only the dictionary can meet. But at present many students are not sufficiently acquainted with EFL dictionaries to get from them the full amount of help which they afford. EFL dictionaries are generally designed in such a way that individual learners can use them by themselves without necessarily relying on the help of a teacher. However, taking the Chinese learner’s present reference habits and skills into account, it is necessary for the teacher to give guidance on the full use of an EFL dictionary. Without proper guidance from a teacher it seems hardly possible for the learner to be aware of, let alone to use, the encoding information supplied in the learner’s dictionary (or dictionaries) he owns. Learners can be much influenced by their teachers when they come to buy a monolingual dictionary. This is also true when they come to use it. Therefore teacher guidance is all-important. The learner has to be encouraged and taught to use the EFL dictionary for encoding. Then by making constant use of encoding information, he may come to realise that example sentences can be used as a starting point for composition, example phrases as a check on collocation, and register labels as a guide to stylistic accuracy. The more he uses the dictionary for encoding, the more confident he will 56 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 be in using it. It is only when the learner uses the dictionary for purposes of language production as well as comprehension that he has got the most out of it. 2. The Learner’s Encoding Problems Having discussed briefly the value of encoding information in EFL dictionaries and the insufficient use that is made of it, I can move on to the second part of the paper, that is, the question of what remains to be done by EFL lexicographers to help the learner with his encoding problems. &dquo;Dictionaries are ultimately made for and judged by the needs of real people in real situations&dquo; (Hartmann 1981). In order to satisfy the learners’ productive needs it is necessary for the dictionary maker to know their linguistic difficulties. Let me begin by presenting a few sentences for error analysis. These and all the other example sentences given in this paper were written by Chinese students of English as an academic subject. They were second-year students of the Foreign Languages and Literature Department at the University of Fudan who had studied English for about five years before they entered the university, but did not begin to use monolingual learner’s dictionaries until they became university students. The following are five sentences picked out from their compositions: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) When the typhoon came, our ship seemed dancing upon the waves, rolling from side to side. In order to get into the German-occupied area, he pretended an old lady. It was his carelessness that led the experiment to failure. He has become a police officer for ten years. Then the seller ran after me and offered £8 for it. In sentences (1)-(5), the students expressed themselves quite acceptably except for the incorrect use of the verb in each sentence. There are two possible reasons for that. One is first language interference, in this case, interference from Chinese. The other is intralinguistic rather than interlinguistic. &dquo;Interference from the mother tongue is clearly a major source of difficulty in second language learning&dquo; (Richards 1974). Learners tend to use their native language structure to initiate sentences in the target language, and where structures in the first language (L1) and the second (L2) differ, interlinguistic errors will occur. The student who used &dquo;seemed dancing&dquo; in (1) appeared to think that since the Chinese equivalent of the finite verb §F » (haoxiang) can be followed by a word expressing an action, he could use the -ing form of the verb after &dquo;seem&dquo;. 57 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 Errors stemming from L1 interference are due to unfamiliarity with L2, i.e. to the learner’s not having learned much of the target language (cf. Dulay and Burt 1974). It is possible that the error in (1) is due to L1 interference, but it is difficult to explain the errors in (2)-(5) in the same way. These are intralinguistic ones &dquo;which reflect the general characteristics of rule learning, such as faulty generalisation, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn conditions under which rules apply&dquo; (Richards 1974). Generalisation is &dquo;the use of previous available strategies in new situations&dquo; (Jakobovits 1969), but over-generalization of target language rules covers instances where the learner produces a deviant structure through his heavy experience of other structures in the target language. In (2), for instance, from &dquo;act the hero&dquo;, &dquo;play the fool&dquo;, &dquo;imitate her friend&dquo; and &dquo;take off his teacher&dquo;, the student seems to have generalized, producing &dquo;pretended an old lady&dquo;. The learner may have come across the sentence &dquo;The company’s financial policies led it to bankruptcy&dquo;, where &dquo;the company&dquo; and &dquo;it&dquo; are co-referential, and his error in (3) is produced by not observing fine restrictions on co-occurrence. It is perfectly correct to say &dquo;He has been a police officer for ten years&dquo;, but &dquo;become&dquo; used in the sense of &dquo;come to be&dquo; as in (4) is a change of state verb which cannot combine with an adverbial of duration. In (5), the subject is a seller, not a buyer, and while we can say &dquo;the buyer offered £8 for iy&dquo;, we should also say &dquo;the seller offered it for £8&dquo;. The student confused the two complementary patterns, which while semantically different, are nonetheless close enough structurally to be mistaken for each other. The influence of several patterns may contribute to the making of errors. If a learner is called upon to produce some L2 form which he is not familiar with, he will tend to produce an erroneous form having its origin in his L1. Therefore, as I suggested earlier, beginning students would be more likely to make errors which can be traced to direct translations from the learner’s source language. I can give some more examples of interference type (6) (7) (8) errors: Even though so, the play ran for six weeks. Although it was supposed to be very funny, but nobody laughed. You are not a teacher of French, are you? Yes, I am not. I am a teacher of English. The author of (6) used &dquo;even though so&dquo; in the sense of &dquo;in spite of this&dquo;, obviously a direct translation f¡ _m Chinese. The Chinese but&dquo; can be used as a correlative conjuncequivalent of &dquo;although tion, but in English the correlative conjunction is &dquo;although yet&dquo;. ... ... 58 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 The error in (7) may also be found in the writing of African learners. A Chinese uses &dquo;yes&dquo; to express his agreement with a negative statement while a native speaker of English would naturally say &dquo;no&dquo; on such occasions. There are two typological answer-types to such questions. English answers such questions by an acceptance or rejection of the implied facts while Chinese (and also Japanese, Swahili, Korean) bases the answers on the form of the interrogative (cf. James 1980). When a Chinese student says &dquo;The level of the country life will be raised in a few years&dquo;, his Chinese teacher of English knows what he means by &dquo;the level of the country life&dquo; is &dquo;the national standard of living&dquo;. Yet another example of an error due to interference is that a student wrote &dquo;Her parents died one by one within a month&dquo; when he wanted to say &dquo;Her parents died within a month of each other&dquo;. When students reach the intermediate or advanced level they tend to produce a greater proportion of confusion type errors which are due to the misapplication of target language rules rather than the misapplica- tion of source language rules (cf. Seliger 1978). Rather than reflecting the learner’s inability to separate two languages, intralinguistic errors reflect the learner’s competence at a particular stage, and illustrate some of the general characteristics of language acquisition (cf. Richards 1974). There are some types of errors that we can expect an EFL dic- tionary to help with more readily than others. It is not easy to persuade commercial publishers to produce dictionaries for a particular group of learners, say, Chinese learners of English, because they need a world market rather than a purely regional one (though the Chinese market is bigger than many). So we cannot expect help with interference errors that are not shared by several language groups. Yet as is mentioned in Cowie (1979), &dquo;pedagogical dictionaries should help the learner to be aware of, and if possible avoid, common sources of error in the language he is attempting to acquire&dquo;. And it can be rightly assumed that a monolingual learner’s dictionary can only help the learner to apply target language rules so as to avoid confusion type errors. 3. Errors and EFL Dictionaries I shall now refer to three EFL dictionaries with a view to finding to what extent they have anticipated the learner’s difficulties in using English verbs in examples (1)-(5), or in other words, how the verbs misused by Chinese students are grammatically dealt with in these dictionaries. The three dictionaries to be compared in this paper are the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1974, hereafter ALD), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978, hereafter LDOCE) and Chambers Universal Learners’ Dictionary (1980, 59 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 hereafter CULD). The ALD and the LDOCE use verb pattern codes, but the CULD has a limited traditional coding system which classifies verbs as vt and vi. For reasons of economy I shall quote only that part of the entry that highlights the point in question. seem ALD LDOCE [VP4D, E, 2A] [13; L (to be) 1, 7, 9] CULD vti All three dictionaries give a number of illustrating examples after the definition, but as I intend to compare mainly their coding systems, these examples will not be quoted here. The learner faced with indecision as to whether he can use &dquo;seemed dancing&dquo; in (1) can get information from the codes in the ALD and the LDOCE. In the ALD, the pattern &dquo;subject&dquo; + vi + present participle&dquo; is coded as [VP2E] (e.g. They’ve gone dancing), and in the LDOCE, this pattern is represented by the code [14] (e.g. She came running) or [L4] (e.g. She ended up dancing on the table). As these codes are not noted against &dquo;seem&dquo; in the ALD or the LDOCE, the learner can be sure that it is not correct to say &dquo;our ship seemed dancing&dquo;. The CULD simply marks the verb as both transitive and intransitive, and the grammatical information is implied in example sentences. These examples are useful, but do not give clear guidance as to whether a given pattern is excluded. pretend ALD [VP7A] to be LDOCE asleep. They ed not to see us. [T1,3] pretended sleep when his mother called him. pretended to be reading. vt She was only pretending to be asleep; I pretend not to understand; (formal) He pretended surprise ( = to be surprised). He He CULD Decoded, the code [VP7A] in the ALD means &dquo;subject + vt + + to-infinitive&dquo;, which shows that &dquo;pretend&dquo; used in the sense of &dquo;give and appearance of, in order to deceive&dquo; cannot be followed by a noun. (According to the ALD it can take a noun as an object when used in a different sense.) In the LDOCE, the code [T1, 3] means that &dquo;pretend&dquo; is a transitive verb which can combine with one object, either a noun or a to-infinitive. Two example sentences are given to support the (not) 60 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 code. The CULD lists the transitive use of &dquo;pretend&dquo;, providing three examples, one of which corresponds to LDOCE [Tl]. Referring to the LDOCE and the CULD, the learner finds &dquo;pretend&dquo; coded [Tl] and labelled vt respectively, and such examples as &dquo;pretended sleep&dquo; and &dquo;pretended surprise&dquo;. This grammatical information is not adequate for the learner to avoid the error in (2), for he still cannot understand why &dquo;pretended an old lady&dquo; is not permissible. What is needed in the LDOCE and the CULD is the information that only abstract nouns can be used as objects of &dquo;pretend&dquo;. lead ALD LDOCE CULD [VP2C] (fig) This led to great confusion. (&dquo;lead to&dquo; as a separate entry) v prep [T 1, 4] vi (fig: with &dquo;to&dquo;) The heavy rain led to serious floods; Eating too many sweets leads to rotten teeth; This course of action might lead to difficulties. The ALD code [VP2C] means that &dquo;lead&dquo; is an intransitive verb followed by an adverbial adjunct. A style label &dquo;fig&dquo; (figurative) is marked after the code, but &dquo;lead to&dquo; is not treated as a lexical unit. The LDOCE treats &dquo;lead to&dquo; as a separate main entry and the code [Tl, 4] clearly indicates the transitive use of the phrasal verb, though no example is given. The CULD labels &dquo;lead&dquo; as intransitive and shows that when used figuratively the verb is followed by &dquo;to&dquo;. The three examples are informative. become ALD a famous He became a doctor. He has The custom has now He has a rule. accustomed to his new duties. It’s becoming much more expensive to travel abroad. [VP2D] man. LDOCE [L1,7] He became king. The weather became warmer. CULD 1. vi His job coat has become more became increasingly difficult; Her badly torn; She has become even beautiful. ’ 2. a vi (of doctor. people) She became a nun; He became All three dictionaries give much the same grammatical information. But since the learner often confuses &dquo;become&dquo; with &dquo;be&dquo;, as is the case with (4), the rule that &dquo;become&dquo;, even when used in the perfective 61 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 aspect, cannot go with an adverbial of duration should be mentioned either by way of a usage note or through examples of the comparative use of &dquo;become&dquo; and &dquo;be&dquo; (e.g. He became a police officer ten years ago. cf. He has been a police officer for ten years.). This information seems to be missing in any of these learner’s dictionaries. offer ALD [VP6A, 7A, 12A, 13A, 14] We ed him the house for £20000/ for the house. ed him £20000 LDOCE [D1 (to); Tl: (for)] She offered me £10000 for that book. CULD vt He offered her £5 for the picture. The codes in the ALD and the LDOCE give more detailed information about the syntactic behaviour of the verb &dquo;offer&dquo; than the label vt in the CULD. All three dictionaries provide example sentences, but the ALD gives two illustrative samples to show two different patterns in which the verb is used. What is to be noted is that the shared subject &dquo;we&dquo; in the ALD has different referents: it is the seller in the first and the buyer in the second. It would be more helpful to the learner if the ALD could make this clear by changing the subject. So far, so good. The most important word in a sentence is the verb, the structural criterion for a major sentence pattern being that every sentence should have a predicator. Chinese students, like other foreign learners of English, find it difficult to use English verbs (or phrasal verbs) in an idiomatic way. From the grammatical information given in the five entries in the three foremost EFL dictionaries, we can see that some information is adequate, providing required guidance, but that some detail is still missing. As far as the syntactic guidance on the use of verbs is concerned, there is room for improvement in EFL dictionaries. As a rule, Chinese students have less trouble with the English noun than with the English verb, but they still misuse the noun at times. They use uncountable nouns as countables as in the following sentences: (9) Billy always complains about inflations. (10) &dquo;A buck&dquo; is an American slang for &dquo;a dollar&dquo;. It often occurs that the learner has difficulty in deciding which may or may not be used in the plural form or be preceded by ’a’ ’ . When he is in doubt, the learner turns to EFL dictionaries, but is not nouns always helped by them. The indication of [C] (countable) and [U] (uncountable) or nc (noun countable) and nu (noun uncountable) is very 62 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 useful to the learner, but sometimes dictionaries differ in their coding. &dquo;Inflation&dquo; is marked as [U] and nu in the ALD and the CULD respectively, but it is not marked at all in the LDOCE, which suggests that &dquo;inflation&dquo; is regarded as a countable noun. Such conflicting information may leave the learner all the more confused. The word &dquo;slang&dquo; is coded as uncountable in all three dictionaries, yet only the CULD gives the illustrative example &dquo; ’A stiff’ is slang for ’a corpse’ &dquo; which resolves the learner’s problem. Another headache for Chinese students, but not only for them, is number agreement between subject and verb. In their compositions we can come across sentences like: (11) At that time few of us was aware of the importance of being diligent. (12) I have two brothers, but neither are here. (13) Tom or his sisters is going to Paris next week. (14) Neither I nor he know her name. True, such problems of agreement are really ones for the EFL grammarian, but information on grammar and usage is also expected in individual entries in an EFL dictionary. A good learner’s dictionary should give guidance as to the form of the verb after a certain subject. (Guidance on agreement is only needed in certain cases like &dquo;few&dquo;, &dquo;either&dquo;, &dquo;neither&dquo;, &dquo;both&dquo;, &dquo;any&dquo;, &dquo;some&dquo;, etc.) In (11), the verb must be used in the plural form, because the subject &dquo;few&dquo; is plural. Fortunately, we get this information from the examples in all three dictionaries : ALD LDOCE CULD Few of those worth buying. There Few of the children are tired. I can’t give you one. Few are as clever as he is. roses are are so few that In correct usage &dquo;neither&dquo; takes a singular verb, and so in (12) &dquo;neither&dquo; must be followed by &dquo;is&dquo;. (The nearest nouns or pronouns may govern agreement, e.g. Neither of the brothers were interested in taking part.) In the three dictionaries we find such example sentences as: ALD LDOCE CULD Neither (one) is satisfactory. 2 books that are neither of them very good ( = neither is good). (They) neither of them wanted to go. Neither of them could understand Italian. 63 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 The ALD explicitly shows which form should be used after the subject &dquo;neither&dquo;. The LDOCE uses the singular form in the explanation given in the brackets. The CULD shows touch the point in question. a useful pattern, but does not When the nouns connected by &dquo;or&dquo; do not agree in number, as in (13), the verb is governed by the noun to which it is nearer. In (13), &dquo;is going&dquo; has to be replaced by &dquo;are going&dquo;. Can the learner get this overt grammatical guidance from an EFL dictionary? The CULD does not deal with this point. Neither does the ALD. Only the LDOCE mentions this usage in the entry for &dquo;either&dquo;, where some illustrative examples are helpful. As the Usage notes at &dquo;neither&dquo; in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD 1969) point out, when elements within a &dquo;neither ... nor&dquo; construction differ in point of number, the verb agrees in number with the element to which it is nearer; and when the nearer element is a personal pronoun, the verb agrees with it. Therefore, in (14), the verb should be in agreement with &dquo;he&dquo;, and the correct sentence is &dquo;Neither I nor he knows her name&dquo;. Again, neither the ALD nor the CULD tackles this problem satisfactorily. The LDOCE gives the example &dquo;Neither my father nor I were there&dquo; in the entry for &dquo;neither&dquo;, but the entry for &dquo;either&dquo; makes it clear that &dquo;either ... or&dquo; and &dquo;neither ... nor&dquo; are plural when the word next to the verb is plural. This is self-contradictory: the example at &dquo;neither&dquo; runs counter to the point. In the course of writing, Chinese students are often at a loss to decide whether to choose a singular or plural verb after such subjects as &dquo;a group of children&dquo;, &dquo;a pile of newspapers&dquo;’ or &dquo;a fine collection of foreign stamps&dquo;. After &dquo;a group of children&dquo; either a singular or plural verb may be used, but &dquo;a pile of ...&dquo; and &dquo;a collection of ...&dquo; can only be followed by a singular verb. Unfortunately none of the EFL dictionaries seems to have foreseen this difficulty. What is more puzzling to Chinese students is the number concord between a collective noun and a finite verb. Grammatically, collective nouns sometimes can accompany a plural verb even when they themselves are singular in form, but students are not always certain whether they should use a singular or a plural verb after collective nouns such as &dquo;family&dquo;, &dquo;government&dquo;, &dquo;committee&dquo;, &dquo;class&dquo;, &dquo;audience&dquo;, &dquo;assembly&dquo; and &dquo;company&dquo;. They have difficulty, for example, with the following: (15) Her family is often quarrelling among themselves. (16) The audience was shouting at the top of their voices. In (15) and (16) the singular verb cannot sensibly be used at all because of the plural pronoun &dquo;themselves&dquo; and the determiner &dquo;their&dquo;. 64 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 The learner receives a good deal of help with (15) from all three dictionaries, but cannot find much explicit help with (16). The CULD does not show number concord; the ALD gives the example &dquo;There was a large audience in the theatre&dquo;, which is not of much help; the LDOCE does highlight the learner’s difficulty by providing the example &dquo;The audience was/were very excited by the show&dquo;, but it fails to point out that a plural verb is required in such contexts as (16). Of the other five collective nouns mentioned above, the learner is helped only with &dquo;government&dquo; from the ALD, &dquo;company&dquo; from the LDOCE and &dquo;committee&dquo; from the CULD. For the benefit of the learner at the production level, the problem of number concord will have to be dealt with more thoroughly in the EFL dictionary. not contain such a word class as the initial modifier in a noun phrase, Chinese students very often make mistakes in their use of &dquo;the&dquo; or &dquo;a&dquo;, especially when the use of the article is determined by collocability or idiomaticity. In the following sentences: As the Chinese language does article, which often functions (17) (18) (19) (20) When I was tired from as reading, I played flute It’s time for lesson. It’s pity that he hasn’t taken the hint she has for pleasure. given him. Before long the another man approached me and wanted to sell pens and watches to me. (21) The old man lived in the Wellington Street. (22) Dr Lee entertained us to a lunch. The definite article &dquo;the&dquo; is obligatory in (17) and (18) (though the indefinite article is possible in the latter), and the indefinite article &dquo;a&dquo; in (19); but &dquo;the&dquo; in (20) and (21) and &dquo;a&dquo; in (22) should be deleted. (The article is used in (22) when a special meal is meant.) Problems of article usage can be dealt with in individual entries, or in the entry for the article itself, or in both. For example, the use of &dquo;the&dquo; with musical instruments after the verb &dquo;play&dquo; is introduced in the entry for &dquo;the&dquo; in all three dictionaries, but only the CULD provides such example sentences as &dquo;He plays the flute&dquo; and &dquo;He played a tune on the flute&dquo; in the entry for &dquo;flute&dquo;. Of the 28 words for keyboard, wind and stringed musical instruments found by random searching in the CULD, 26 (bassoon, cello, guitar, harmonium, piano, trumpet, etc.) are illustrated with two examples similar to those given in the entry for &dquo;flute&dquo; (with the exception of &dquo;bugle&dquo;, &dquo;drum&dquo; and &dquo;fiddle&dquo; which have only one example each). This is exceptionally helpful, because the learner has access to the information about article usage at several possible reference points. Let us suppose the learner is sure that it is correct to say &dquo;It’s time for 65 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 class/breakfast/bed, but does not know whether &dquo;It’s time for lesson&dquo; is also acceptable. He does not receive explicit help with (18) from any of the EFL dictionaries. In the case of (19), the LDOCE labels &dquo;pity&dquo; [S] (referring to special singular nouns that can be used with &dquo;a&dquo; or &dquo;an&dquo; but not with &dquo;one&dquo;) and gives the example &dquo;It’s a,pity it’s too cold to go swimming today&dquo;. The ALD also explains the use of &dquo;pity&dquo; with the indefinite article by giving the example &dquo;It’s a pity (that) he can’t swim&dquo;. But the CULD does not provide much help in this case. In (20), &dquo;another&dquo; cannot be preceded by &dquo;the&dquo;. The learner gets this information from the ALD and the LDOCE (both in the entry for &dquo;other&dquo;), though not from the CULD. Incidentally, the information about &dquo;another&dquo; given at &dquo;other&dquo; in the ALD is clear and sufficient, but the plural form of &dquo;another&dquo; could be presented in the entry for &dquo;another&dquo; . The learner who has difficulty with (21 ) expects to be helped with article before the name of a street. Such examples as &dquo;101 Oxford Street, London&dquo; and &dquo;She lives in Shakespeare Street&dquo; are found at &dquo;street&dquo; in the LDOCE and the CULD, but not in the ALD. In the Usage notes at the end of the entry for &dquo;the&dquo;, the LDOCE explains that &dquo;the&dquo; is not used with the names of meals after &dquo;at&dquo;, &dquo;before&dquo;, &dquo;during&dquo;, &dquo;for&dquo;. This information is very useful indeed, but not sufficient to help the learner with (22), because the preposition used in (22) is &dquo;to&dquo;. The student may turn to the entry for &dquo;lunch&dquo;, only to find that the LDOCE gives no examples at all. The ALD and the CULD tackle the problem by means of exemplification in the entry for &dquo;lunch&dquo;, but more examples might be given in the ALD. When speaking or writing, adult English native speakers have few problems in using structural or grammatical words, but Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with the use of these plain words, which &dquo;are straightforward enough, but they are not quite so simple as they seem&dquo; (Leech et al. 1982). The Chinese learners’ errors in the following sentences are attributed to a lack of understanding of the standard usage of conjunctions and prepositions: (23) (24) (25) (26) It is extremely doubtful that she can win the prize without his help. a lecturer of linguistics. An accident happened in the campus. Except hunger they were happy. Mr Smith is Sentences (23)-(26) all strike us as odd. In a statement intended to convey doubt or uncertainty rather than unbelief, the most common practice is to use &dquo;whether&dquo; or &dquo;if&dquo; after &dquo;doubtful&dquo;. This information is given in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 66 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 but not found in any EFL dictionary, though the ALD and the LDOCE mention the use of &dquo;whether&dquo; and &dquo;that&dquo; in the entry for the verb &dquo;doubt&dquo;. We can say &dquo;a lecturer in linguistics&dquo; or &dquo;a lecturer on linguistics&dquo;, and &dquo;on the campus&dquo; or &dquo;on campus&dquo;, but is it possible to say &dquo;a lecturer of linguistics&dquo; as in (24) or &dquo;in the campus&dquo; as in (25)? No answer has been given in the EFL dictionary. The information about the choice of appropriate prepositions should be included in the entries for &dquo;lecturer&dquo; and &dquo;campus&dquo;. In all three dictionaries a fairly large number of examples are given to indicate the use of &dquo;except&dquo; and &dquo;except for&dquo;, but only the ALD distinguishes the difference between the two by giving an explanation in the brackets followed by a comparative example. This brief Usage note anticipates the learner’s difficulty and could have helped the learner to avoid the error in (26) if he had been aware of the pitfall and consulted the ALD. Another area of difficulty for the Chinese learner is making the right choice between synonymous or semantically related words and attaining a good style. This is not merely a matter of grammar, but has much to do with the semantic and stylistic information provided in the learner’s dictionary. The following inappropriate sentences arise from Chinese students’ compositions: (27) Miss Hays is our respectable teacher. (28) She said, &dquo;Don’t forget to take your passport with you when come next you week.&dquo; (29) Although he exerted every effort plucked in the exam. to revise his lessons, still he got In (27), the student used &dquo;respectable&dquo; in the sense of &dquo;respected&dquo;, but the distinction between the two is not made in the EFL dictionary. &dquo;Take&dquo; should be replaced by &dquo;bring&dquo; in the context of (28), but the ALD and the CULD do not compare the meanings of &dquo;take&dquo; and &dquo;bring&dquo;. The LDOCE does illustrate the fine differences of meaning of &dquo;bring&dquo;, &dquo;take&dquo;, &dquo;carry&dquo; and &dquo;fetch&dquo; in the Usage notes at the end of the entry for &dquo;bring&dquo;. This is of much help to the learner, but unfortunately, cross-references are only shown in the entry for &dquo;fetch&dquo;. When the student looks up the word &dquo;take&dquo; in the LDOCE, he is not referred to the information about the difference between &dquo;take&dquo; and &dquo;bring&dquo;. Syntactically, sentence (29) is sound, but it seems that the student employed a mixed style. &dquo;Exert every effort&dquo; is a somewhat formal expression while &dquo;get plucked&dquo; is dated British slang. The CULD labels the verb &dquo;exert&dquo; as &dquo;formal&dquo;, but the LDOCE and the ALD give it no style label. 67 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 4. Suggestions for Further Improvements It is not surprising that when a foreign student feels uncertain about the usage of an English word, he seeks guidance from a learner’s dictionary. Suppose the EFL lexicographer knows of the learner’s lexical or syntactic needs through investigation. The problem he is then faced with is how to satisfy the user’s particular needs, or in other words, how to help the learner to use English words or phrases correctly. My suggestions for further improvements in EFL dictionaries are as follows: (a) The lexicographer should provide full information about possible grammatical constructions by means of coding systems not simply for verbs but also for nouns, adjectives and adverbs. This is one of the remarkable features of the LDOCE. A coding system is a highly economical form of treatment, though the learner has of course to master it before he can use it. The existing pattern codes are often too complicated for users to master. Students are &dquo;daunted by the effort needed to master them&dquo; (B~joint 1981). Take the ALD for example. In its third edition the verb patterns are numbered from 1 to 25, and there are altogether 51 patterns if different sub-groups are included. Learners, however tenacious their memory may be, can hardly be expected to remember what [VP3B] stands for, even if they have studied the Introduction thoroughly and use the dictionary frequently. This is probably why the grammatical patterns in learner’s dictionaries are so little used in spite of the lexicographers’ great efforts in designing the coding systems. If pattern codes are to be used to the expected extent, the lexicographer should try to simplify his pattern systems, possibly by using such familiar and mnemonic labels as V (verb), T (transitive), I (intrasitive), 0 (object), Od (direct object), Oi (indirect object), C (complement) and A (adjunct). So long as this can be done economically, it seems sensible to attempt to do so (see the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English Vol. II). But of course applying the same principles to the design of a system for a general EFL dictionary would not be easy (cf. Cowie 1984). But the best of codes are abstract whereas exemplification is conThough the latter is space-consuming, it is of much practical value. Example phrases and sentences convey both syntactic and semantic information. Sometimes examples also show stress patterns (as in the ALD). Therefore, it is a very good policy to make information maximally explicit by providing examples. &dquo;The verb patterns with the example sentences are designed to help the learner to multiply his language experience&dquo; (Jain 1981), but the fact is that examples are referred to much more often than pattern codes. To my mind, exemplification is more helpful and appreciated than codification, especially at present, when the complexity of the coding systems inhibits their use and appropriate reference skills still need to be developed. However, generally (b) crete. 68 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 valid rules should be exemplified by short contexts. For reasons of space, fragmented phrases are to be preferred to illustrative sentences If they can serve the purposes equally well. In the entry for &dquo;collection&dquo;, for instance, the LDOCE provides the example sentence &dquo;Janet has a very good collection of foreign coins&dquo;, but the ALD gives a number of alternative words within a phrase &dquo;a fine collection of old swords/paintings/ postage stamps&dquo;. As well as occupying no more space than the LDOCE example, this indicates to the student a useful range of lexical choice. (c) In his productive use of an EFL dictionary the learner will find Usage notes especially helpful. Usage notes are intended to focus on grammatical and semantic points which are common to several entries. For instance, the use of the definite article &dquo;the&dquo; before &dquo;piano&dquo;, &dquo;violin&dquo; and other musical instruments, and the difference between &dquo;bring&dquo; and &dquo;take&dquo; can be explained in the usage notes in the entries for &dquo;the&dquo; and &dquo;bring&dquo; respectively. The different meanings of &dquo;the first floor&dquo; or &dquo;the second floor&dquo; in British English and American English can similarly be illustrated in the Usage notes at the end of the entry for &dquo;floor&dquo;. Besides, notes on usage can give comments about the meanings of words that are often confused (such as &dquo;gourmand&dquo; and &dquo;gourmet&dquo;, &dquo;collide&dquo; and &dquo;crash&dquo;). Of all the learner’s dictionaries, the LDOCE is now ahead in this one respect and its Usage notes have proved a considerable success. (d) I should now like to suggest that one of the new features in the learner’s dictionaries should be the indication of synonyms. The value of the listing of synonyms in a pedagogical dictionary lies in the fact that it helps the learner to discover the associative ties within the lexicon by exhibiting the semantic differences and similarities between related items. On the practical level, which may be of more importance, it helps the learner to find the appropriate word he seeks but which happens to escape his memory. It is difficult to give absolute synonyms, so only the closest near-synonyms (or partial synonyms) can be expected. Limited comparison of a few near-synonyms, for instance, will always be useful to the learner, because they will show at least the most important distinguishing features. Take &dquo;stipend&dquo;, &dquo;salary&dquo;, &dquo;wage&dquo; and &dquo;pay&dquo; for example. Probably the learner knows these words, but he may not know the precise differences in their range of application. He will benefit greatly from information of this kind. (e) Finally, I shall be concerned with the attainment of ease and subtlety in the learner’s use of the foreign language. Those who acquire it as a mother tongue use words and idiomatic expressions naturally. But a foreign learner has to learn them before using them. If he does not know the social status of a word or an idiom, he cannot use it in a proper way. Very often the use of inappropriate words puts the user in a ridiculous or 69 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 painful position, or even causes misunderstanding. Therefore, it is necessary to give connotative information in a learner’s dictionary. The indications of connotative information (labelling colloquial, slang, vulgar, nonstandard, regional, etc.) can be very helpful. In the CULD, the LDOCE and the ODCIE, some innovation has been made in this respect. True, it is not always easy to describe the connotative status of words and expressions, because style values can show great variation from person to person; yet it is the task of the EFL lexicographer to provide as much stylistic information as possible. 5. Conclusion In this paper I have tried to emphasise the value of making use of EFL dictionaries for encoding activities, and by presenting the linguistic difficulties which Chinese learners of English have in writing, I have attempted to show what the EFL lexicographer can do to help the learner to use lexical items correctly in order to construct acceptable English sentences. Syntactic information can be given at least in three ways: (a) (b) (c) by means of pattern codes; through examples; through explanations in Usage notes. But as users’ surveys have shown, EFL monolingual dictionaries often used for decoding than for encoding, and much needs to be done to help foreign learners to use syntactic information to fuller are more advantage. Note For valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article and general to prepare a publishable version I owe particular thanks to A.P. Cowie at the University of Leeds. My thanks are also due to Rosemary Sansome and Lesley Jeffries whose comments have been very helpful. For any imperfections which remain, I am, of course, solely encouragement responsible. References H. 1981. The foreign student’s use of monolingual English dictionaries : a study of language needs and reference skills. Applied Linguistics 2:3. 207-222 Béjoint, Cowie, A.P. 1979. The treatment of polysemy in the design of a learner’s dictionary. Dictionaries and their users, ed. by R.R.K. Hartmann. Exeter: the University of Exeter. 70 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015 Cowie, A.P. 1983. The pedagogical/learner’s dictionary: English dictionaries for the foreign learner. Lexicography: principles and practice, ed. by R.R.K. Hartmann. London: Academic Press. Cowie, A.P. 1984. EFL dictionaries: past achievements and present needs. Exeter ’83 proceedings, ed. by R.R.K. Hartmann. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag. Dulay, H.C. and Burt, M.K. 1974. You can’t learn without goofing. Error analysis, ed. by Jack C. Richards. London: Longman. Hartmann, R. 1981. Dictionaries, learners, users: some issues in lexicography. Applied Linguistics 2:3. 297-303. Jain, M.P. 1981. On meaning in the foreign learner’s dictionary. Applied Linguistics 2:3. 274-286. Jakobovits, Leon A. 1969. A psycholinguistic analysis of secondlanguage learning and bilingualism. Urbana, Illinois. Institute of Communication Research. James, C. 1980. Contrastive analysis. Longman. Harlow, Essex. Leech, G. 1981. Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin (2nd edition). Leech, G. et al. 1982. English grammar for today. London: Macmillan. R. 1973. The social impact of dictionaries in the UK. Lexicography in English, ed. by R.I. McDavid and A.R. Duckert. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Quirk, Richards, Jack C. 1974. A non-contrastive approach to error analysis. Error analysis, ed. by Jack C. Richards. London: Longman. Seliger, H.W. 1978. On the evolution of error type in high and low interApplied Linguistics 4:1. 22-30. actors. Indian Journal of 71 Downloaded from rel.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on April 8, 2015