BRYLENE P.

GLORIA FIL 253

2012-3101 NOBYEMBRE 9, 2019

ILANG PAG-AARAL SA LARANGAN NG LEKSIKOGRAPIYA

A Study Of English Majors In A Chinese University As Dictionary Users

This study describes the natural dictionary-using behaviors of a group of first-year English
majors at Fudan University, Shanghai. It aims to gain some insights into how Chinese students as
competent English learners actually use and view their dictionaries in the highly digitalized era,
as well as the most common problems they encounter in finding contextual meanings for the
looked-up words and the possible causes.

METHOD OF THE STUDY

OBJECTIVE:

• To gain some insight into their habits as dictionary users after one semester’s study at the
English department.

TARGET RESPONDENT:

• 70 First-year English majors on a voluntary basis

Students were first asked to name all the dictionaries they use for their study and identify the
most frequently used dictionary and reasons as well as occasions for using it.

Then they were to record the entire look-up process of 8 new words in the reading text of their
choice. And at the end of the assignment, they were asked to describe their ideas of a good
learners’ dictionary.

40 out of 70 students submitted the assignment before the due date at the beginning of the spring
semester, and 37 of the completed assignments were eligible for analysis.

The analysis conducted of the collected data was essentially a descriptive one, aiming to answer
the following four central questions:

1. What types of dictionary do the students use?

2. Which dictionariesdo they use/

3. What are their dictionary look-up patterns and what specific consultation problems did
they encounter in the look-up process?

4. What are their expectations of a good learners’dictionary?

The Impact Of E-dictionary Strategy Training EFL Class

This study attempts to clarify how effective strategy training has been with pocket electronic
dictionaries for non-English major EFL learners in an English reading class. This study also
provided the participants with (1) metacognitive tasks as an outside-class activity; (2) setting a
collaborative learning environment with peer review; (3) an explicit presentation of the strategies
and references skills with a projector.
METHOD OF THE STUDY

• PURPOSE

The present study examined wether or not the training in reference skills strategies conductedin
the previous studies (Koyama 2013,2015; Koyama and Yabukoshi, 2011) was an effective means
of improving reding comprehension especially for non-English major students of English. In
addition, the study assessed how well they could retain E-dictionary reference skills and
strategies.

• PARTICIPANTS

The participants in the study were 14 undergraduate students whose major was social sciences.
Given both the results of in-class quizzes and a 45-item pre-class cloze test (M=18.1, SD=3.90),
their English proficiency level ranged from intermediate to false-beginners.

PROCEDURE

• First day of the training, the participants were provided with an orientation to the course.

• In each of the classes, a vocabulary check sheet was distributed to the participants for an
outside-class task.

• Most participants, however, looked-up words and phrases unfamiliar to them in each
essay and jotted down the most appropriate L1 and/or L2 equivalents or example
sentences of the looked-up words on the sheets beforehand.

• When they finished reading an essay in the textbook, a review exercise including reading
comprehension and vocabulary quizzes was administered.

• While taking the quizzes, the participants were not allowed to consult their dictionaries
but to refer to their vocabulary check sheets.

• The training period was divided into two sessions. The participants in the first sessions
explicitly taught four E-dictionary strategies, as well as some other reference skills, by
the instructor such as:

• 1.) guessing meanings from the context before actual look-ups;

• 2.) associating dictionary information with their background knowledge;

• 3.) checking usage examples of the target words;

• 4.) and paying attention to pronunciation of the target words and pronouncing them.

• Before and after the training sessions, the participants were given pre- and post- tests
made up of 15 sentences containing words with multiple meanings and idiomatic phrases.
They were required to read and answer them while using their dictionaries.

DISCUSSING EXAMPLES IN LEARNER’S DICTIONARIES FOR FOREIGN

LANGUAGE PRODUCTION
Mei Xue University of Århus, DENMARK

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the value of the data on examples for foreign language
learners in production and explore what characterizes examples to facilitate foreign language
production. This explorative study will focus on two aspects: first, the language difficulty
characterizing Chinese undergraduates in English writing will be identified based on the analysis
of typical errors made in their compositions and their specific needs for assistance from
examples in dictionary. Second, qualitative research will be made on examples of some
headwords in three dictionaries, namely, Oxford Advanced Learner‘s Dictionary of English
(7th), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (4th) and Longman Language Activator
(2th). The first two dictionaries are chosen for they are the most popular learner‘s dictionaries
with Chinese learners of English, and the last one for it‘s production-oriented. The qualitative
research and analysis is based on functional theory of lexicography.

These studies shed some lights on the exemplification in learner‘s dictionaries, but still cherish a
lot of hope on lexicographer‘s craftsmanship, which are partially attributed to the 3 fact that they
lack of the guidance from lexicographic theories in real sense.

CONCLUSON:

In production, learners expect to extract information about ―syntactic behavior, collocational

preferences and selectional restrictions, sociolinguistic features (including register and regional
variety), semantic features and contextual effects‖ (Rundell, 1999: 37). Examples are long
assumed to be an effective way to describe various aspects of lexical behaviors in different
contexts for learners. The above analysis demonstrates that the discussion about selection and
presentation of examples will be superfluous without considering the purposes for which the
examples are used. The parameters affecting exemplification should be considered with learners‘
particular needs arising in the specific user situations, which are greatly shaped by the learners‘
mother tongue, background culture, their learning circumstances as well as their L2 proficiency.
Furthermore, examples function with other types of data, such as definition, grammatical notes,
word class, etc. to help learners in production.

A LARGE PRONUNCIATION DICTIONARY FOR THAI SPEECH PROCESSING

Patcharika Chootrakool, Chai Wuttiwiwatchai, Krit Kosawat

This paper reports the design and development of a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary
for the Thai language. LEXiTRON-Pro is useful for Thai speech processing as well as other
related language processing areas. It is a list of words along with their associated pronunciations
in the form of phoneme-symbol sequences. Derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA), a phoneme set, which was particularly defined in NECTEC, contains 21 phonemes of
single initial consonants, 17 phonemes of cluster consonants, 24 vowels and 5 tones. Phoneme
symbols are a computerized version of IPA symbols. We also created rules for deriving the
phoneme transcription separated by syllables in order to avoid ambiguous pronunciation. Distinct
words were selected from various sources of texts based on their frequently use. At present, there
are over 130,000 word entries, composed of common words and named entities of person, place,
and organization. The current usage of this dictionary is for training a letter-to-sound conversion
tool, which has been used for building speech recognition corpora and used as a text processing
part of text-to-speech synthesizer. The design, development process, application review,
statistical analysis of dictionary, problem discussion, and future work are described in detail.

BUILDING PROCESS

• Word extraction As mentioned, word lists that are selected to add into the dictionary are
collected from variety of sources. In the case of text articles, we have to extract a word
 list from them. The process starts by parsing the text by automatic word segmentation
tools, in our case the SWATH (Meknavin et al., 1997) and a Conditional random field
(CRF) based tool (Haruechaiyasak et al., 2008). These automatic tools are still far from
perfect, said none of them can produce more than 95% word segmentation accuracy.
Therefore, a further process of human checking is required.

• Letter-to-sound conversion (LTS) and human checking Words not existing in the
LEXiTRON-Pro are considered new words to be entered in the dictionary. Each new
word is passed to one of automatic LTS tools built in NECTEC (Tarsaku et al., 2003;
Thangthai et al., 2006). The tool produces the pronunciation representative of the word in
the form of a phone sequence with syllable segmentation and syllabic tone marked. It
also marks syllable boundaries in the textual word.

• Adding into the LEXiTRON-Pro dictionary The LEXiTRON-Pro dictionary is simply an

ASCII plain text file containing the word list with textual syllable boundary tagged and
the corresponding pronunciations of words in the list in the form of phone sequences with
syllable segmented accordingly. Currently, the format of the dictionary is indeed as
simple as the output of LTS tools illustrated in the Figure 3. New words passed from the
LTS and human checking process is appended in this dictionary.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

This paper presented a large-scale Thai pronunciation dictionary which can serve as an
infrastructural resource for Thai speech and language processing. The LEXiTRON-Pro
dictionary will be freely open-source for research and development communities. Although the
word definition applied in this dictionary is quite weak as a text chunk is considered a word unit
if it appears often in real text, the very large amount of word entries, over 130,000 currently, may
include almost every Thai word except ones newly constructed such as person names.

A STUDY OF DICTIONARY USE AND DICTIONARY NEEDS OF ESP STUDENTS

Trinidad Fernández Technical University of Madrid, SPAIN

This article describes a survey of the dictionary use of ESP students in the Building Engineering
School of the Technical University of Madrid, (UPM). It includes the frequency of students‟ use
of dictionary information, the situations in which they use it, the type of dictionaries they use,
and how useful such information is perceived to be. The aim is to find out which dictionaries are
more helpful for the students‟ ESP learning. The instruments for data collection were a
questionnaire and the „Quick Placement Test‟ of OUP. The study indicates that students in
general make very limited use of dictionaries, and when they do use them they prefer bilingual
dictionaries as they seem to satisfy their inquiry promptly.