Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

reception dictionaries versus production dictionaries such as the Language
Activator (1993). Production dictionaries permit one to hunt for the precise
word to express something one wants to say. If you decide to talk about your
problems, you look up the concept ‘problem’ and see which of the 12 related
ideas (e.g. ‘ways of saying that a person causes problems’) best expresses what
you want to say; a version of this is found in the thesaurus that forms part of
word-processing programs – mine tells me that other ways of saying ‘diction-
ary’ are ‘lexicon’, ‘word list’ and ‘glossary’, though unlike a production diction-
ary it does not tell me the differences in meaning between them.
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corpus-based dictionaries such as COBUILD versus example-based dictionar-
ies such as the OED. Traditional dictionaries such as the OED depended on col-
lecting a large sample of words from many sources, including other
dictionaries. Recent dictionaries have been based on large-scale collections of
real spoken and written language processed by computer. The OED may give
the precise technical meaning of a word, COBUILD its everyday use. For exam-
ple, according to the OED ‘bronchitis’ is ‘Inflammation of the bronchial
mucous membrane’, according to COBUILD ‘An illness like a very bad cough,
in which your bronchial tubes become sore and infected’. One definition gives
an accurate medical definition; the other suits a layperson’s understanding.
Dictionary use can only be minimal during speech, however important it may be
during reading and writing. At best students can use it as a prop for the occasional
word, say, in a lecture, as many of my overseas students seem to do with their
pocket electronic dictionaries.
Strategies for understanding and learning vocabulary 59

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