WHY IS MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH DICTIONARY SUGGESTED TO USE THAN BILINGUAL DICTIONARY IN ENGLISH FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING ?
NURUL HIDAYAH
SRN: 0801249251
A dictionary is amongst the first things a foreign language learner purchases (Baxter 1980), student who learn english as foreig language usually bring dictionary and seldom to bring grammar book or other kind of english books. The most often question raised from EFL student, may be is “what dictionary should I use?”. Before I explain more about it, we have to know what is bilingual and monolingual dictionary. Bilingual dictionaries are dictionaries whose entries are in one language and whose definitions are in another. The most useful bilingual dictionaries are bi-directional. For example, a bilingual Indonesia dictionary consisting of English entries with Indonesia definitions and Indonesia entries with English definitions are far preferable to dictionaries that list words only uni-directionally. Monolingual dictionaries are dictionaries whose entries and definitions are both in a single language. For instance, a monolingual English dictionary has entry words in English, definitions in English, and all examples in English. Because of this, comprehensive monolingual dictionaries are useful only to very advanced learners of a foreign language. You must have an excellent grasp of the language to be able to interpret definitions, descriptions of usage, and other information in a foreign language. (No name. 2004. Finding the right foreign language dictionary (3)http://www.vistawide.com/books/types_of_dictionaries.htm ) According to Philips Scholfield in his article entitle “Why Shouldn't Monolingual Dictionaries be as easy to use as Bilingual or Semi-Bilingual ones?” mentioned that Surveys of learners’ use of dictionaries generally confirm the teacher’s suspicion that, way beyond the elementary level, many still prefer bilingual or semi-bilingual dictionaries to monolingual ones. Although the surveys said like that, it does not show that bilingual is the best. Most EFL teachers, language educators and researchers prefer their students to use the monolingual dictionary (Yorkey, 1970; Baxter, 1980; Ard, 1982; Snell-Hornby, 1984; Bloch, 1985; Hartmann, 1989; Soekemi, 1989 and Stein, 1990)(Koren. 1997. Quality versus Convenience: Comparison of Modern Dictionaries from the Researcher's, Teacher's and Learner's Points of View http://tesl-ej.org/ej07/a2.html). There are some reason why most EFL teachers suggested monolingual dictionary to use.
One of the reasons for the educators' preference for the monolingual dictionary is the explanations of meanings. According to Yorkey (1970) and Snell-Hornby (1984) is that "BD [bilingual dictionaries, S.K.] are counterproductive because they culturate the erroneous assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the words of the two languages". To strengthen the argument above, Koren (1997) prefers monolingual dictionaries mainly because bilingual dictionaries do not handle meaning distinctions of equivalent translation well, so that using monolingual is very help the learners to mastering the target language. The explanation of meanings is very clear and describe well what the words mean.
Second, specifications of a word's grammatical behavior. it means that sometimes a word functions as a certain part of speech, like a noun, but other times it functions as a different part of speech, such as a verb. For example, the word 'play' can be a noun (a play that you want on stage; a performance) or a verb (to play with your toys).
Third, the illustration of the meaning and the syntactical use of a word with real language examples. (Zarei. 2010. #54, Research Paper: ‘The Effect of Monolingual, Bilingual, and Bilingualized Dictionaries on Vocabulary Comprehension and Production’ http://www.eltweekly.com/elt-newsletter/2010/03/54-research-paper-the-effect-of-monolingual-bilingual-and-bilingualized-dictionaries-on-vocabulary-comprehension-and-production-by-abbas-ali-zarei/) With using monolingual dictionary, A translation should convey to its reader the same message with the same aesthetic and other values, not to mention the same denotative meaning, which are conveyed by the original text.
On the other hand, if we learn a language as foreign language especially for the beginner can not use monolingual dictionary totally because beginners do not master the words in the target language yet at all so that if they use monolingual dictionary then do not understand, they also must use bilingual dictionary.
Finally, those are some reason why monolingual dictionary is really suggested to use to help the EFL learners to mastering English well and soon, although there is opposite reason about that, monolingual dictionary has still much advantages to use that very help the learners.
REFERENCES
Koren, S. (1997). Quality versus convenience: comparison of modern dictionaries from the teacher’s and learner’s points of view. TESL, 2: 1-16.
No Name. (2004). Finding the right foreign language dictionary (3) retreive 27 june 2011 (http://www.vistawide.com/books/types_of_dictionaries.htm)
Shira Koren. (1997). Quality versus Convenience: Comparison of Modern Dictionaries from the Researcher's, Teacher's and Learner's Points of View . Retrieve 27 june 2011 (http://tesl-ej.org/ej07/a2.html )
Snell-Hornby, M. (1984). The bilingual dictionary: help or hindrance? In R.R.K. Hartmann (Ed.), LEXeter '83 Proceedings. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 274-281. Mentioned by Aust, R. Kelley, M.J. & Roby, W.
Yorkey, R.C. (1970). Electronic dictionaries in CALL. Computer Assisted Language Learning 1, 95-109. Mentioned by Aust, R. Kelley, M. J. & Roby, W.
