TINA-LOUISE SMITH reviews the Illustrated School Dictionary for Southern Africa (Francolin, R29,95)
HMM, I enjoy dictionaries and this one is no exception. The design is colourful and well-spaced. Guide words at the top of each page are big and make for quick referencing. The style of entries is explained with examples at the beginning to help teachers understand how they are done.
A section on ”How to use the dictionary in the classroom” is also included. It provides activities which serve to familiarise learners with the dictionary presentation. The compilers do not assume that if you have a dictionary in your hand, you automatically know how to use it.
This dictionary is intended for non-mother-tongue English users. The compilers’ awareness of their readership is also clear: the appendices include many mistakes commonly made by English second-language users. Numbers in their cardinal (1,2,3) and ordinal forms (1st, 2nd, 3rd), which learners often have difficulty with are listed and contracted forms are shown with their expanded forms. There are many more such lists.
All words used in definitions can be found in the dictionary. This means that pupils with smaller vocabularies than others will also be able to use it effectively.
On the back cover it states that ”More than 800 key terms from science, social studies and other subjects are included.” This is a great help to teachers and pupils.
Lots of research has gone into tailoring this dictionary for use amongst second-language speakers of English and the absence of a phonetic table may seem odd. Douglas Van Der Horst, the publisher, explains that the dictionary was sampled in a number of schools listed on the last page and the team realised that ”teachers, let alone pupils, could not cope with phonetics”. Pronunciation guidance is given as ”rhymes with” or ”sounds like”.
Plurals are not indicated unless they are unusual plural forms, for example ”two sheep” as the plural of sheep. I wonder why the unchanged plural form of fruit is omitted.
Much thought has clearly gone into this dictionary, but I do think there could be a few more illustrations — especially of prepositions like ”without” and ”at” which confuse second-language speakers no end.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, February 28, 2000.
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