Traditional dictionaries are often too difficult for students who are not very keen on linguistics. Learners' dictionaries can help to solve this problem: they serve both as a reference book, decoding what the learner does not understand, and as an instrument that supports text production.

Traditional dictionaries usually contain a lot of useful information for foreign language students. Late studies, however, revealed that most of the students do not understand the given information. Some of them even hardly know that this kind of information can be found in a dictionary. Especially when it comes up to writing many students make syntactic errors, such as wrong verb complement or verb mode choice. They don't check on the dictionary what construction a verb requires, or if they do, they are not able to decode the provided information.
Dictionary makers complain that those problems arise due to a general lack of competence in grammar or in dictionary use, which is certainly true. Nevertheless, having acknowledged the fact, some dictionary makers succeed in helping the students by providing more simple and easily-accessible information.

Hence, lexicographers designed a special kind of dictionary, the so-called learners' dictionaries. A learners' dictionary serves both as a reference book, decoding what the learner does not understand, and as an instrument that supports text production.
Research on learners' dictionaries started already in the 1920s and 1930s with the so-called "vocabulary control" movement. The basic idea was to ease the burden of foreign language learning by limiting the vocabulary to a core part which would suffice for everyday communication. Since then much research has been done, not only in terms of coverage but also in the way meanings are defined and illustrated. Most learners' dictionaries are monolingual, and until recently most of them were only available as textbooks.

The following example is taken form the in Langenscheidt's learners' dictionary "Deutsch als Fremdsprache".
Entry: "Fenster"-window.

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The entry contains pictures of windows, a definition, collocations, an example, compound words, an idiomatic expression, and an adjective. In a printed dictionary space is limited, information is structured in a linear way and many abbreviations are used. It is therefore difficult to get an overview of the provided information. Moreover, it is impossible to directly access semantically related words, except derivations and compound words which, according to their usual lexicographic order, are physically close to the word under consideration. And even those words are difficult to find, if the user is not familiar with the global organisation of the dictionary. The compound word "Fenstersims" (windowsill), for example, is listed within the entry "Fenster". "Fensterbrett", a synonym to "Fenstersims", is not listened within "Fenster", but as a single entry at the same level as "Fenster" further below.

Without a doubt, learners' dictionaries are very useful, but still, in paper form, they do not tackle some problems we've just mentioned.
Nowadays, most dictionaries are available in electronic version, too. However, these are often one-to-one conversions of the printed form and do not exploit the vast possibilities offered by new hypermedia systems.
The dictionary of the Third Millennium is surely electronic, but new approaches have to be developed in order to tackle problems regarding an efficient exploitation of the medium and an underlying didactic theory.

The online ELDIT dictionary (German/Italian-Italian/German) tries to exploit the new hypermedia technologies and presents a special elaboration and presentation of the material it contains.
BILD
The ELDIT dictionary includes only the so-called basic vocabulary for each language. For each word entry only the most important usage patterns are given. The presentation of this information, however, has been carefully designed for language learners. Relations between words and between the two languages are explained, and a large amount of well-designed illustrative material, such as examples, pictures and sound files, is provided. Moreover, while reading about an entry the learner can quickly access to a connected word. The word house, for example, is linked to home and family including lots of examples and suggestions.

Judith Knapp

Some other learners' dictionaries:
COBUILD Student's Dictionary 
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary 
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

06.07.2005