Dictionary use

Building your vocabulary

You can make use of different dictionaries, which could be: § bilingual (English – Russian, Russian - English); § monolingual (English - English); § electronic; § paper. Dictionaries can be helpful but they are difficult to use well. The skills needed to use a dictionary well will depend on your purpose. Do you want to use your dictionary to help you to understand an oral (listening) or written (reading) text? Or do you want to use your dictionary to help you produce language (speaking and writing)?

Understanding (listening & reading) If you want to use your dictionary for understanding spoken or written texts, you will mainly be interested in looking up the meanings of words. It is important to remember, though, that the dictionary can never know the exact context in which the word is being used, so you will have to use your knowledge of the language as well. You will need to: 1) use your knowledge of the language to get information about the grammar of the word you want to look up; 2) guess the general meaning of the word in the context; 3) find the word in the dictionary; 4) choose the correct entry in the dictionary, making sure that the meaning given by the dictionary fits in the context.

Task 1. [in pairs]

You are reading an article about psychology and see the following sentence:

Psychology's scope shifts with the field's evolution.

You do not understand the words ‘scope’ and ‘shifts’. Follow the steps described above and find the suitable meaning of these words in the following extracts from a bilingual dictionary.

Task 2. [in pairs]

Look at the bilingual dictionary entry for ‘ argue ’. Identify the meaning of the word in the sentence below. Now have a look at the monolingual dictionary entry for ‘ argue ’. Does it give a more suitable meaning?

What many authors do is to argue that it is impossible to define psychology in a way that will keep everybody happy but that we can get past this by looking at the 'fields of psychology'.

Production (speaking and writing) If you want to use your dictionary to help you produce spoken or written texts, you will need much more information. You may need:

B.d.	M.d.
		pronunciation	- how to pronounce the word
		spelling	- how to spell the word
		grammatical patterns	- whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective etc and which patterns it occurs in
		collocations	- which other words it typically occurs with
		frequency	- how common the word is
		register	- which type of language the word is used in, letters or reports, spoken or written biology or business etc?
		meaning	- what the word means
		translation
		formation	- how the word is made up e.g. what other words or affixes are part of the word, which other words is it related to
		connotations	- what other meanings a word has, as well as its main meaning e.g. is it a positive or negative word?
		example sentences

Task 3. [individually]

Compare the following dictionary entries. The first one is from a bilingual dictionary, the other comes from a monolingual dictionary. Tick the information they give in the chart above. Which dictionary gives more information about the word ‘study’?

Some dictionaries are better than others. How good is yours? What information does it give about words?

Task 4. [(a) in pairs; (b) individually]

(a)

How would you say ‘ определить предмет психологии’ in English? Look at the bilingual dictionary (Russian-English) entries below and choose the suitable variants of translation. Explain your choice.

Sometimes a bilingual dictionary entry contains enough information for you to be able to identify the correct translation. But when this is not the case, you can try a double search: - look up a word in a bilingual dictionary; the dictionary may give several possibilities in English; - look up each of those possibilities in a monolingual dictionary to see which meaning fits in the context.

(b) Use a monolingual dictionary to check if you were right about the variants you have chosen in task 4 (a).

Task 5. [in pairs]

Discuss with a partner the advantages and disadvantages of a bilingual dictionary compared with a monolingual dictionary.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27