21
required for full comprehension, and that any values below this level will
automatically result in L2 reading being hindered because of insufficient vocabulary.
However, in a recent study involving 745 participants, Laufer and Ravenhorst-
Kalovski (2010) revisited the lexical threshold required for adequate text
comprehension. They found that the learners whose vocabulary size was between
6,000 and 8,000 word families understood 98% of text’s words, whereas those whose
vocabulary ranged between 4,000 and 5,000 word families reached 95% lexical
coverage. Hence, Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski suggested possessing 8,000 word
families as an ideal vocabulary knowledge threshold leading to 98% of text
comprehension, and a lower threshold of 4,000-5,000 word families to achieve 95%
comprehension.
Similarly, Hu and Nation (as cited in Laufer, 2013) argued that a lexical text
coverage of 98% is the required level for adequate comprehension, as only some
learners in their study could read adequately at a 90% and 95% lexical coverage.
However, it seems that students enrolled at university should have far more extensive
vocabulary than 5000 and 8000, as suggested by Hazenburg and Hulstijn (1997) who
claimed that freshmen university students should learn at least the 10,000 most
frequent base words of the language to cope with first-year reading assignments.
Overall, vocabulary knowledge is paramount to L2 reading comprehension as
it is “. . . the strongest predictor of comprehension, even more so than other factors
including topic familiarity, strategy use, and grammar knowledge” (Prichard &
22
Matsumoto, 2011, p. 207). In the following section, literature pertaining to the
development and lexicography of monolingual learner dictionaries is presented.
1
.
4
.
Dictionaries and Foreign Language Reading Comprehension
Many dictionaries are now available not just in printed format but also in
electronic formats, such as CD-ROM dictionaries, online dictionaries, handheld
devices, and even as Android applications on smart phones, palmtops, and tablets
.
There is a wide range of dictionaries with different languages, language varieties,
vocabularies, sizes, formats, prices, intended purposes, and users
.
Of this variety of
dictionary types, the following section gives a brief historical overview of the
development of English monolingual learners’ dictionaries, since they are the ones
used in this study
.
1
.
4
.
1
.
The Development of English Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries
For more than fifty years, the area of pedagogical lexicography for learners of
English has been characterized by a “rapid and constant change, technological
advance, innovative and creative development, and responses to users’ needs and to
teachers’ suggestions and demands, and an increasingly competitive market”
(Kirkness, 2004, p
.
56)
.
Recently, different English-speaking countries, like Australia
and the United States, have compiled their own monolingual dictionaries (MLDs).
Yet, the leading center for making English MLDs has been and is still Great Britain
(Kirkness, 2004)
.
23
Four British MLDs for advanced learners have controlled the dictionary
market worldwide
:
the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English
(OALD), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), the Collins
COBUILD English Dictionary (CCED), and the Cambridge International Dictionary
of English (CIDE)
.
These MLDs adopt the same principles, that is, “the need to limit
the word list to only the most important words, but to treat them more fully, with
pronunciation indicated through phonetic transcription, with grammatical information,
explanation of idioms and use of examples, and meaning conveyed in simple terms”
(Béjoint, 2000, p
.
66)
.
Oxford University Press first published the OALD in 1942, entitled the
Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary
.
It was then republished as the OALD in
1963, 1974, 1980, 1989, 1995, and 2000
(Kirkness, 2004)
.
Some of the major features
of the OALD are
:
(1) the systematic indication of information necessary for encoding,
such as whether nouns are countable or uncountable, and what the plurals of nouns,
the comparatives of adjectives, and irregular verbal forms are; (2) a large number of
examples representative of current usage;(3) the indication of the received British
pronunciation (RP) by means of the transcription of the International Phonetic
Association (IPA); (4) pictorial illustrations; (5) the presence of a certain number of
appendices, such as illustrations, irregular verbs, punctuation, numerical expressions,
and weights and measures (Béjoint, 2000, pp
.
66-67); and (6) the use of stylistic
24
labels or pragmatic markers to indicate register and subject field (Kirkness, 2004, p
.
69)
.
The LDOCE was first published in 1978, edited by Paul Procter, to compete
against the OALD
.
It was again published in 1987, 1995, and 2001
.
It was basically
similar to the OALD in layout organization and types of information provided, but
also included other important innovations such as the use of a controlled defining
vocabulary of 2,000 words, the availability of IPA transcripts for both British and
American pronunciations, and finally the use of computer assistance, primarily to
check the consistency of the defining vocabulary (Kirkness, 2004)
.
The CCED was first published in 1987, edited by John Sinclair
.
It was then
published in 1995 and 2001
.
The CCED was claimed to be a corpus-based dictionary
of “real English” (Kirkness, 2004),
as all usage examples were extracted directly from
a computerized corpus of 20 million words, whereas meanings and uses were
explained in a discursive, full-sentence style, simulating teacher talk
.
Cambridge University Press introduced the CIDE in 1995, edited by Paul
Procter
.
It was largely based on the Cambridge Language Survey of 100 million
words which were collected from the main standard varieties of English, mainly
British, American and Australian English
.
It also used “a corpus of learner English,
which identified typical learner errors
.
.
.
.
[,] guidewords to help users to distinguish
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