Pedagogical Lexicography Today: A Critical Bibliography on Learners' Dictionaries with Special Emphasis on Language Learners and Dictionary Users (review)

This book is the first major bibliographical survey of current work on pedagogical lexicography. The field of pedagogical lexicography has grown rapidly and now has a sufficiently large literature to merit a book-length treatment. This bibliography aims to provide an overview of the major studies and situate each study in the right context within the field of pedagogical lexicography. Dolezal and McCreary use the term ‘pedagogical lexicography’ to encompass many different notions such as pedagogical dictionary (French dictionnaire pédagogique), learners’ dictionaries (German Lernerwörterbücher), school dictionaries (German Schulwörterbuch), and college dictionaries. The domain of pedagogical lexicography, according to them, includes the study and production of dictionaries for the specific purpose of assisting language learners as well as the study of the use of dictionaries by teachers and students in formal and informal settings. The focus therefore is especially on ‘the mutual concerns of the teacher, the lexicographer and the learner/dictionary user’ (ix).

The book contains an introduction and an alphabetically ordered annotated bibliography (521 research articles) followed by an index of monolingual learners’ dictionaries (12 titles) and a topical index (563 topics). The selection of research articles is very broad, and, in fact, at first glance, the list seems to contain too many articles which are only remotely related to the field. D & M explicitly state, however, that they intended to make it ‘inclusive’ and thereby encourage ‘cross-reading’ (x). The obvious advantage of this approach is its wide coverage across different related disciplines such as language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computational/corpus linguistics, and foreign language learning and teaching (especially research on vocabulary learning and reading comprehension). Researchers in pedagogical lexicography are often unaware of the abundance of research conducted in these other disciplines. I often find that the studies in these disciplines employ more rigorous scientific methods and that they serve as good models for a more scientific approach to the study of pedagogical dictionary use. D & M’s bibliography encompasses many important works in other disciplines that pedagogical dictionary researchers simply cannot ignore.

Another aspect of this inclusiveness is that the bibliography covers works in several languages: German, French, and English (and a few in Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese). Recent German publications in the area of pedagogical lexicography, in particular, are important to the field, which makes this bibliography an excellent introduction for those who have difficulty in accessing information about relevant work published in languages other than English. D&M provide a separate German terminology index at the end of the book to accompany the 86 German articles cited, which shows how much importance they place on German studies. The only important journal missing that I can think of is Afrilex’s Lexikos, in which several papers on dictionary use may be found, including some of my own (e.g. Tono 1992, 1996).

The introduction provides a brief overview of a cross-disciplinary nature of pedagogical lexicography. D & M go on to examine such ordinary terms as learner’s dictionary and the user (der Benutzer) to show the necessity of a precise definition in the field.

I found their wide-ranging topical index extremely useful. In preparation for this bibliography, D & M compiled a computer database that had an index of not only lexicographic terminology but also key words selected on the basis of their frequency of use in the titles and epitomes. Thanks to this database, they could classify 521 articles into various subareas and topics in pedagogical lexicography. Besides being an index of topics (563 topics in total), the topical index also includes an index of monolingual learners’ dictionaries, and a Sachregister (an index for the German articles). These categories can be very useful for introducing important concepts of pedagogical lexicography in, for instance, a lexicography course at university or...