Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries

Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries D! Kazuo Dohi|G. Edward Thorndike compiled a few monolingual student dictionaries for native speakers interesting from the standpoint of present-day learners' dictionaries. Among others, Thorndike influenced the pioneer learner's dictionary, Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED) (Hornby and others 1942), parent to all later learners' dictionaries, both British and American.1 Editors of some recent learners' dictionaries search corpora for evidence of frequency: for instance, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Third Edition (LDCE3) marks the 3000 most frequent words in written and spoken English by means of a code; and the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD2) marks frequency by means of diamond-shaped symbols. But whether committed to corpus research, or to representing frequency within a dictionary's text, all learners' dictionaries rely on some notion of frequency to generate their word lists, and may also consider the frequencies of grammatical constructions and word 'Chief among the British variety are The Advanced Learner's Dictionary ofCurrent English (2nd ed., 1963), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), and all subsequent editions of these works, the Cambridge InternationalDictionary ofEnglish (1995), and Harrap's Essential English Dictionary (1995); the American variety includes The Newbury House Dictionary ofAmerican English (1996) , Random House Webster's Dictionary of American English (1997), Longman Dictionary of American English, NewEdition (1997) , The American HeritageEnglish as a Second LanguageDictionary (1998), NTCs American English Learner's Dictionary (1998), and Webster's New World Basic Dictionary ofAmerican English (1998). Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Soaety ofNorth America 22 (2001) 154Kazuo Dohi meanings. The contemporary interest of such frequencies and their possible lexicographical applications stems, though often indirectly, from Thorndike's views on the relationship between word frequency and language learning, the focus of his research in educational psychology throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but most memorably expressed in his school dictionaries, published by Scott Foresman in the 1930s and 1940s. Before he began to compile pedagogical dictionaries, Thorndike compiled word books on the basis of "word count" or frequency in English literature (1921a and 1931), an enterprise he justified in "Word Knowledge in the Elementary School": How many English words should the ordinary boy or girl know the meanings of at the end of Grade 8? Which words should all or nearly all pupils know at that stage? In what grades and in what connections should they be learned? ... [0]ne notable cause of our inability to answer [these questions] correctly is our lack of knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of words in the talk our pupil and graduate should hear, and the books, articles, letters and the like which he will or should read. Just as word counts of such material as the pupil may need to write are instructive in the pedagogy of spelling, so word counts of such materials as the pupil may need to understand will be instructive in the pedagogy of reading, and indeed of all the school subjects which are presented with the aid of language. (1921b, 334) Here we see articulated for the first time some essential aspects of present -day learners' dictionaries and their forerunners. Before one can instruct someone in a language, whether native or foreign, one must determine what that speaker will most likely need to know, and at which stages of his or her learning. Thorndike had counted for ten years before publishing The Teacher's Word Book (1921a), an alphabetical list of the 10,000 words then found most frequently in written English. Further research allowed Thorndike to publish two successive enlargements of that book (1931 and 1944) .2 As has often been pointed out, the word books derive from manual word counts in a literary "corpus." For his first word 2The author was unable to obtain the original A Teacher's Word Book of Twenty Thousand Words (1931) and has been compelled to consult the corrected version (1932). He conducted his survey on the assumption that there is no substantial difference between the two issues. Dr. Thorndike's Influence on Learners' Dictionaries155 book, Thorndike examined 41 standard literary texts, including the Bible and Shakespeare, as well as Bartlett'sFamiliar Quotations...