Robert Lew

Adam Mickiewicz University | UAM · Faculty of English

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/ccu038?ijkey=i9w1YQww9oRepzF&keytype=ref This article makes a case for bilingual learners’ dictionaries. These dictionaries are very different from traditional bilingual dictionaries, being attuned to the productive needs of learners who are speakers of a specific L1. Although they have been around for som...

We use modern eye-tracking technology to scrutinize the process of sense and equivalent selection in polysemous bilingual entries. Our study subjects, intermediate and advanced Polish learners of English, consulted 26 Polish-to-English dictionary pages prompted with a sentence translation task. Throughout the task, an eye-tracking device unobtrusiv...

This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective of the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the status of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general internet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicograp...

The rate at which electronic dictionaries have been replacing their printed counterparts is impressive, though not altogether unexpected, at least by some experts (Atkins 1996). As a result of the revolutionary character of the transition, designers of electronic dictionaries find themselves in a void when it comes to user studies specifically addr...

This article adopts a cognitive linguistic approach to idioms as motivated lexical units. The focus is on lexicographic applications of the notion of motivation; specifically, on the usefulness of imagery in the form of pictorial illustrations and etymological notes in idioms dictionaries. We discuss the main features of idiom semantics, review the...

Creating high-quality dictionary entries has been a meticulous and time-consuming process, but current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help to speed up this process. This study explores the use of ChatGPT to create COBUILD-style English monolingual entries and evaluates its ability to generate accurate and high-quality sense defi...

Creating high-quality dictionary entries has been a meticulous and time-consuming process, but current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help to speed up this process. This study explores the use of ChatGPT to create COBUILD-style English monolingual entries and evaluates its ability to generate accurate and high-quality sense defi...

In studying the performance of academic systems, one often tries to find out—by inspecting some well-defined parameters—how specific changes in the legal system influence the volume and quality of desired outputs, such as publications, patents, or alumni. This mechanistic approach neglects the fact that the main actors in this spectacle are not pas...

New methodological and co-creation approaches are needed in Digital Humanities (DH) for cross-disciplinary collaboration oriented to sustainability. More specifically—in the context of Environmental Humanities and regarding biocultural diversity—a key challenge is to set effective and engaging ways of rapid knowledge generation for public awareness...

Despite the remarkable advances made in recent years to facilitate the lexicographer’s work of interpreting and synthesizing the complexity of language uncovered by corpora, an uncritical use of cutting-edge corpus tools and resources can instill a false sense of assurance. In this paper, authentic examples pertaining to wordlist use, collocation r...

The emergence of COVID-19 affects the world population in many ways, resulting in its own specialised discourse. In addition to providing a source of data for analysis, this discourse has also led to a rethinking of multifarious research methods. This section presents a series of articles by scholars from different parts of the world with macro-and...

We offer an efficient mathematical model for forecasting the course of an emerging epidemic, with COVID-19 as a use case. We predict the future course of confirmed cases in a number of countries, and present the results in a modern online dashboard, updated daily and accessible to the public.

The need to integrate songs into English Language Teaching (ELT) has been recognized on numerous occasions. Song lyrics host multi-word units which learners can reuse as building blocks in their English, thereby reducing language processing time and effort, and improving their fluency as well as idiomaticity, thus bringing them closer to the native...

The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was ‘CALL and complexity’. As languages are known to be intrinsically and linguistically complex, as are the many determinants of learning (additional) languages, complexity is viewed as a challenge to be embraced collectively. The 2019 conference allowed us to pay tribute...

In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers...

The paper focuses on guiding devices in print monolingual dictionaries for learners of English. It aims to find answers to six research questions. The main aim is to investigate how the location of guiding devices within entries — starting from a new line versus run-on — affects consultation time and sense selection accuracy of dictionary users in...

We report on an in‐depth corpus linguistic study on ‘multiple views’ terminology and word collocation. We take a broad interpretation of these terms, and explore the meaning and diversity of their use in visualisation literature. First we explore senses of the term ‘multiple views’ (e.g., ‘multiple views’ can mean juxtaposition, many viewport proje...

Accepted for publication in Lexikos 2019

This paper presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, the largest survey of dictionary use to date with nearly 10,000 participants in nearly thirty countries. The paper focuses on the comparison of the results of the Slovenian participants with the results of the participants from other European countries. The comparisons are mad...

The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who...

We present ESDexplorer (https://owid.shinyapps.io/ESDexplorer), a browser application which allows the user to explore the data from a large European survey on dictionary use and culture. We built ESDexplorer with several target groups in mind: our cooperation partners, other researchers, and a more general public interested in the results. Also, w...

The aim of the report is twofold: to (1) briefly describe the learning tools of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE6) which are available to English learners in the paid online version of the dictionary (sixth edition); and (2) present the results of the questionnaire that was conducted on 114 students of English at the University...

Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the le...

Dictionaries sometimes include pictorial illustrations to complement verbal explanation. The present study examines the question of how verbal and pictorial elements within an entry compete for dictionary users’ attention, and how this competition affects meaning extraction and retention. The study employs eye-tracking technology to analyse the gaz...

This article presents evidence about research-based teaching techniques that aided making the e-learning tool designed for this research more effective than traditional teaching methods when teaching English articles (e.g. 'a', 'an', and 'the'). The techniques employed were: Master's binary schema, explicit instruction, chunking, and direct feedbac...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5TtErYJ2w W ramach wykładu przedstawię możliwości okulografii, czyli techniki śledzenia ruchu gałek ocznych, w badaniu zachowań użytkowników słowników. Po krótkim wprowadzeniu przedstawię wyniki niedawnych badań własnych z wykorzystaniem tej techniki, w szczególności badania nad podziałem uwagi wzrokowej w lekturze...

Language learners today exhibit a strong preference for free online resources. One problem with such resources is that their quality can vary dramatically. Building on related work on monolingual resources for English, we propose an evaluation framework for online bilingual dictionaries, designed to assess lexicographic quality in four major areas:...

The present study probed the effectiveness for L2 writing of Longman Słownik Współczesny (Fisiak et al. 2004), a bilingual dictionary for Polish learners of English designed primarily with production tasks in mind (Adamska-Sałaciak 2005). Three groups of Polish secondary school students in their final year were asked to write an argumentative essay...

The Department of Lexicography and Lexicology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań has done extensive research on dictionary use in the context of language teaching and learning. The department forms part of the Faculty of English, which is the largest institution in continental Europe educating teachers of English at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. l...

It is only recently that dictionary users have become a central consideration in the design of dictionaries, and this focus has both stimulated and benefited from research into dictionary use. The present contribution reviews the major issues in dictionary design from the user perspective, taking stock of the relevant findings from user research, i...

Studies on dictionary use have been gaining ground over the last three decades or so, but while dictionary use has moved dynamically into the digital medium, user research on digital dictionaries has been somewhat slow in coming. In view of this, the first book-length work on the use of online dictionaries (Müller-Spitzer 2014) is particularly welc...

The present contribution considers the opportunities and limitations of dictionary users studies for lexicography, with particular focus on online dictionaries. Selected methods and techniques are discussed, in each case considering their strengths and weaknesses.

The main aim of this paper is to provide some practical guidance to researchers on how statistical power analysis can be used to estimate sample size in empirical design. The paper describes the key assumptions underlying statistical power analysis and illustrates through several examples how to determine the appropriate sample size. The examples u...

There is some evidence that language learners as dictionary users benefit from access to sense-guiding devices. This study is a first attempt at comparing the efficiency (entry consultation time) and effectiveness (accuracy of sense selection) of sense signposts against a combination of signposts and menus in print monolingual dictionaries for lear...

In what is referred to as Web 2.0 — the next interactive stage in internet experience — web users are no longer passive recipients of packaged content. Increasingly, users actively contribute to the creation and provision of self-made content. This means also that their social roles become blurred. In the context of online lexicography, the tendenc...

Lexicographers have always understood the importance of working with authentic language data in describing language. Before the advent of computers, serious dictionary-making involved an arduous process of manually collecting millions of citations from literature. Dictionary-makers were sometimes assisted in this task by the educated public through...

We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore an...

A previous study (Lew and Mitton 2011) found that the leading monolingual English learners’ dictionaries in their online versions coped poorly with misspelled words as search terms. This paper reports on a repeat of this study in 2012, which obtained similar results, though some changes from 2011 are noted. As in 2011, the performance of the dictio...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the usefulness of when-definitions for conveying information on the grammatical category of headwords. Such definitions are currently employed in some monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLDs) to define abstract nouns, but they have a much longer tradition in English lexicography. By way of introduction, this def...

Successful dictionary use requires two ingredients: (1) high-quality, user-friendly dictionaries and (2) dictionary users who know what they are doing. The bulk of current research effort within lexicography concentrates on making better dictionaries, with new opportunities afforded by the electronic medium. In contrast, the other ingredient — educ...

Successful dictionary use depends on two factors: (1) user-friendliness of dictionaries and (2) good dictionary reference skills of their users. As the world moves from paper to electronic dictionaries, we need to realize that the skills needed to use modern digital dictionaries are not necessarily identical to those for traditional print dictionar...

Multi-word lexical units, such as compounds and idioms, are often problematic for lexicographers. Dictionaries are traditionally organized around single orthographic words, and so the question arises of where to place such complex lexical units. The user-friendly answer would be to include them primarily under the word which users are most likely t...

This study looks at how well the leading monolingual English learners' dictionaries in their online versions cope with misspelled words as search terms. Seven such dictionaries (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, free online version; Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, premium subscription version; Merriam-Webster's English Learner...

Word sketches are one-page automatic, corpus-based summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. They were first used in the production of the Macmillan English Dictionary (Rundell 2002). At that point, word sketches only existed for English. Today, the Sketch Engine is available, a corpus tool which takes as input a corpus of any...

This study looks at how well the leading monolingual English learners’ dictionaries in their online versions cope with misspelled words as search terms. Six such dictionaries are tested on a corpus of misspellings produced by Polish, Japanese, and Finnish learners of English. The performance of the dictionaries varies widely, but is in general poor...

p>ABSTRACT: One finding of user studies is that information on meaning tends to be what dictionary users want most from their dictionaries. This is consistent with the traditional image of the dictionary as a repository of meanings of words, and this is also borne out in definitions of the item DICTIONARY itself as given in dictionaries. While this...

Empirical study of dictionary use is now almost one hundred years old, if we count Grinstead (1915) as the first paper in this category. Obviously, a larger part of the long period saw very little research activity, as the majority of the empirical user studies available today have been done in the last two decades or so (for a recent survey, see W...

In this paper I present an overview of the spectrum of available online English language dictionaries, and then offer some general comments on a few selected key issues. Given the current explosion of web content, it is quite pointless to try to list every single dictionary available. It makes better sense to identify the salient categories of onli...

One important consideration in dictionary-making has been that of space. To conserve space in paper dictionaries, a number of principles, strategies and conventions have been employed. With the gradual transition of the dictionary to the electronic medium, some of these strategies and conventions have lost, or changed, their significance. For one t...

A Way with Words is a Festschrift volume to honour the 70th birthday of Patrick Hanks. The volume is attractively printed on thick, good quality paper, hardbound in cloth and supplied with a cover sleeve (which, I admit in shame, I have a habit of throwing away, but this one has an adorable portrait of Patrick which can be enjoyed quite independent...

In the present paper we compare the effectiveness of two alternative meaning access facilitators in a monolingual learner’s dictionary: a Menu system, placed at the top of a monolingual entry; and a Shortcuts system, where the cues are distributed throughout the entry. We test the two entry formats on 90 Polish learners of English at two CEFR level...

The study undertakes to assess the efficiency of entry menus in bilingual dictionaries in the electronic format. An experimental dictionary interface is tested for performance in terms of access speed and task success. The task underlying dictionary use is guided Polish-to-English translation, performed under three conditions by 90 Polish learners...

In a well-known study, Laufer and Hill (2000) used an experimental electronic dictionary to investigate the lookup patterns and preferences of Israeli and Chinese learners of English and their effect on word retention. The present study attempts to replicate and extend Laufer and Hill's experiment with Polish learners of English. Animated images ar...

Recently, a new defining format has been gaining in popularity in abstract noun entries of monolingual English learners’ dictionaries: a single-clause when-definition. The present study attempts to investigate the role of the definition of this format, placed in a complete microstructure, in conveying information on the syntactic class of nominal h...

In the present paper we examine the question of whether dictionary reference skills can be taught effectively in the classroom. To this end, we test the reference skills of a group of Polish primary-school students attending English classes twice: prior to and following a 12-session specially-designed training program. Despite the subjects high con...

One difficulty in using dictionaries is recognizing the relevant sense in polysemous entries. With a view to assisting dictionary users on this point, recent editions of some learners’ dictionaries have introduced sense access facilitating devices into longer entries. The present study attempts to verify experimentally the effectiveness of one such...

The paper addresses the issue of the relationship between lexicography linguistic semantics, arguing that lexicography should be seen as a separate discipline.

A new type of definition of abstract noun headwords, the single-clause when-definition, has recently found its way into major English monolingual learners' dictionaries. In line with a current broad tendency in pedagogical lexicography, the new definition format seems to be modeled after (English) folk defining, although in fact the latter has so f...

Recently, a new defining format has been gaining in popularity in abstract noun entries of monolingual English learners’ dictionaries: a single-clause when-definition. The present study attempts to investigate the role of the definition of this format, placed in a complete microstructure, in conveying information on the syntactic class of nominal h...

The topic of this paper is the evaluation by Polish learners of English of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries used by those learners. Data for the paper come from 712 Polish learners of English representing a broad range of EFL proficiency levels. Subjects were asked to rate two dictionaries: their dictionary of first choice and their dictionar...

The author discusses a methodological approach to storing, structuring, and processing complex data for a large-scale dictionary use study.

The present paper re-examines the usefulness of questionnaires in dictionary use research, using Glynn Hatherall's well-known criticism of questionnaires as a starting point. It is argued here that charges directed at questionnaires apply equally easily to the alternatives suggested by Hatherall. It is claimed that some research questions require a...

The paper presents a selection of results from a study investigating dictionary use by 712 Polish learners of English representing a variety of FL competence levels and backgrounds. Data from Learner Survey, experiment, and Teacher Survey are brought in to test hypotheses relating to a variety of aspects of dictionary use. Here two aspects have bee...