Job Discussion Forums

[LongShiKong]

If you've studied a foreign language yourself, you'll be all too familiar with the shortcomings of even the best language learning resources.

Electronic dictionaries have been around since the '80s but strangely they're only now just starting to break out of their rigid mold. Way back in the '60s, McLuhan described the problem of new media (technology) attempting to do the work of the old as a rearview mirror approach to technological innovation. It's ironic that electronic dicitionaries, essentially language databases should retain their rigid alphabetical sorting for so long given the simplicity of programming req'd to make them truly useful: sorting/grouping by frequency, category, part of speech, etc. or combinations thereof. My professional Chinese dictionary software bundle at least allows for a wildcard character/string search but only of headwords and the display is ever only limited to one dictionary and I can't sort according to any other criteria than alphabetical.

The problem as i see it is one of language. It's still only a 'dictionary' just as the horseless carriage initially took the form of a horse-drawn carriage and the first refrigerator, that of an icebox with the freezer naturally at the top until relatively recently.

The ideal dictionary would be far more than a dictionary. It would contain a set of collocates, example sentences and self-test exercises for each (sense of a) word, a visual thesaurus (try the online version at http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ ) with distinctions between synonyms clearly indicated, etymological data and links to related words, grammatical and structural information, and L1 definitions.

Such a 'dictionary' would be sortable along the lines of Stephen Glazier's WordMenu (http://www.wordmenu.com/WM-Walkthrough/WM-Walkthrough.html) but in terms of what's displayed, restrictable to the language level, age, and/or (professional) interests of the student so a search for a low-frequency word would be accompanied by a notification along with higher frequency synonyms. It could instantly flag the vocabulary from a digital version of student's coursebook along with chapter and page references and containing sentences for retesting purposes.

Mine has quite a sophisticated flashcard function where I save every character I look up but of course, it can't generate textual and/or audio cloze exercises from the vocabulary I've studied or provide frequency data, common collocates, numerous examples, etc.

The problem with reference tools has always been that each has it's own distinct purpose but quite often you need to use more than one. Google has done this with ads, addresses, and maps but unfortunately, the publishing industry is still literally and figuratively bound to its age old separate and sequential representation of information--the alpha-habit, as McLuhan termed it. What's needed is much more of the type of integration that, for example, smartphone designers have come up with recently by employing cameras for live 'OCR' input.

What would your ideal learner 'dictionary' look like?

[LongShiKong]

Here's a recently published integrated learner dictionary in print and multimedia that at least one poster on the Korean forum has commented on. It combines a 1-5,000 frequency listing with collocates in addition to grouping words by categories. The full title is:A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English: Word Sketches, Collocates and Thematic Lists (Routledge Frequency Dictionaries) but at $160 for the CD, we're sure to find scanned versions of the cheap ($32) paperback version online soon. You can view and download samples and more at http://www.wordfrequency.info/

[Sashadroogie]

Have never seen the point of electronic dictionaries. Nor online translators. Too many distracting bells and whistles and techie stuff, but not much else that isn't already present in a paper dictionary.

Here's what I use: http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Colour-Russian-Dictionary-Thompson/dp/0198606990

[LongShiKong]

[Kofola]

I am one of those who has never used an electronic dictionary. Mostly because if I need a good English dictionary, I can go online and because Slovak/English dictionaries range from appalling to limited. I have the only good one in book form.But I tend to use it in tandem with online Slovak monolingual dictionaries and googling for context.

I'm also not a great fan of dictionaries in the classroom. This is because over the years I have noted that when I or my students look something up we tend to instantly forget it. It seems to be much more effective if you create memorable contexts and negotiate meaning with the students. Also learners need pronunciation models and to hear the word in a variety of contexts. Perhaps some dictionaries do this, but the online ones I've come across only give single word sound files.

[url]I've yet to meet an FT who can define vocabulary as succinctly as a dictionary and within the range of intelligibility of the weakest student in their class.[/url]

I find this worrying (although admittedly I don't know what an FT is but I'm assuming it's some kind of a teacher?) - one of the jobs of the teacher surely is to introduce new vocabulary at all levels and help learners use it appropriately for their level, that would include defining it and giving examples of usage.

[Denim-Maniac]

As a learner of Chinese, I would like a dictionary that was fairly limited in the number of entries, but fairly concise in examples of usage, common sentences patterns, alternative meanings/usage and collocates.

I can all too often find words, definitions, but I still don't really know how to use them. I often find example sentences that are given include words and grammatical patterns Im not familiar with, which is poor form for learners I think.

[LongShiKong]