Turning turtle

Date: Sat, 06 Nov 1999 21:29:52 +0100 From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum

I enjoyed Linda Dehnad's turtles. This fits in with one of the ways that I think about dictionaries ; they are external memory banks that I can plug in when I need them, but which don't clutter up the hard-disk at other times. Now, if some people use them as a tool for vocabulary acquisition, then that's fine by me, and I might suggest to students that they should try it out and see if it works for them. But I wouldn't make that big a deal of it.

I have a reason for that. It seems to me that the very fact that we think in terms of learning vocabulary gets in the way of language acquisition. Dictionaries reinforce this : they are based on the assumption that a language is made up of words, which, a lexicographer might then be persuaded to concede, are joined together by grammar. (Recently, lexicographers have been changing their minds about this, and the quite good series of Cobuild publications is one welcome result).

But I didn't learn French by learning words. I learned it through taking part in conversations and by reading books, and what I picked up was not words, but collocations, schema and stories. I went on to use this stuff - often to highly (unintended) comic effect - occasionally to test it out, but often just because it fitted in - or seemed to me to fit in - wherever it was that the conversation was taking us.

Now, once you've got the language, dictionaries are good for fine-tuning. The twists and turns of a word through time are fascinating - although not always a particularly good indicator of present meaning. In translation work, I wouldn't be without a couple of good English dictionaries, a Thesaurus and the Robert - it would be nice to have them on the hard-disk. But I'm a professional language person and I know how to tame the beasts so that they do what I want them to. Our pupils are not. They need to learn to treat dictionaries with circumspection.

Regards

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com