Encyclopaedic information in learner's dictionaries (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, language: English, abstract: Talking about encyclopaedic information in learner's dictionaries might lead to a never ending debate whether learner's dictionaries should include such additional information and at the same time to what extent. In fact Herbert Andreas Welker's survey of empirical studies concerning the dictionary use also helps to point out that there is little consent when it comes to this debate.

As a matter of fact it is quite difficult to distinguish where exactly an entry becomes encyclopaedic or not. Therefore another special form of learner's dictionaries also is important to be mentioned when talking about encyclopaedic information: the encyclopaedic learner's dictionaries. Since those kind of dictionaries are somewhere in between a encyclopaedia and a dictionary, Martin Stark also likes to call them "Lexicographical Hybrid" (Stark 1999: 3). In order to analyse encyclopaedic entries in learners's dictionaries it therefore seems to be inevitably regarding those encyclopaedic learner's dictionaries as well. As a consequence this paper will briefly illustrate some general information of learner's dictionaries as such. As a next step a closer look will be taken at the distinctive features of the encyclopaedic entries within learner's dictionaries and at the encyclopaedic learner's dictionaries and their role in language teaching and learning.