departmental bulletin paper

Departmental Bulletin Paper

Text

外国語教育のフロンティア. 2022, 5, p. 343-355

Japanese

Text

2022-03-31

研究ノート

This paper discusses the whys, whats, and hows of teaching English–Japanese dictionary use in remedial English courses at university. After a brief introduction, I describe the context of this study. This study is based on my experience of teaching dictionary use in remedial classes. Next, I explain why I call for dictionary usage to be taught in some universities. It may be assumed that as long as learners know the alphabetical order and read Japanese, they can readily use English– Japanese dictionaries, even if they do not have a habit of using them, which is very often not the case when they are not familiar with the microstructure of dictionaries, in other words, how information is encoded and presented in an entry. Without microstructure knowledge and skills, users are often misled by dictionaries. This fact is illustrated by the results of my dictionary usage test, in which students answered mostly multiple-choice questions, first without dictionaries, and then with dictionaries. With dictionaries, the scores of students in remedial courses increased from 28% to 37%. Among cases in which they changed their answers with dictionaries, they switched from wrong answers to correct answers in only about 30 to 40% of the cases. Most surprising are the results of four questions that ask for a contextually appropriate meaning of a verb. The answers to all the four questions are not the meaning that is typically listed first in a dictionary entry, and such meanings are among distractors. The percentage of correct answers dropped from 23% without dictionaries to 13% with dictionaries. Furthermore, only 40% of the students who had chosen the right answer without dictionaries preserved their correct choice, and roughly the same number of them converted to first-listed distractors. As a result, the percentage of the first-listed distractors increased from 43% to 57%. Lastly, in only 4% of cases did students convert to correct answers. This teaches us that learners need to know how to use dictionaries to avoid being misled. Finally, I propose, in the case of dictionary teaching in remedial courses at university, to focus on how to disambiguate unclear words based on lexico-grammatical information in dictionaries. To that end, dictionary users need to recognize numerous correspondences within a dictionary, and between a dictionary and a text they are reading. I exemplify the disambiguation process, showing how adept users employ lexico-grammatical information to disambiguate an ambiguous word in a sentence.

10.18910/87588

87588

レメディアル大学英語教育における英和辞典使用法の教育についての覚書

山泉, 実

大阪大学大学院言語文化研究科

Japanese

2022-03-31

外国語教育のフロンティア

5

343

355

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/87588

10.18910/87588

https://doi.org/10.18910/87588