On Structuring The Cross-Referencing System In The Pedagogical Dictionary For Elementary And Intermediate CFL Learners

As the mediostructure of a dictionary, the cross-referencing system plays a significant role in helping perform various lexicographical functions, and this is particularly true with pedagogical dictionaries. Cross-references in a pedagogical dictionary mainly facilitate presenting the morphological, phonetic and semantic connections between or among the linked entry words. They provide teachers with possible clues as to where they should take their students when teaching the target lexicon in class. However, the cross-referencing system in CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) pedagogical dictionaries is unsatisfactory. Those dictionaries with incomplete cross-referencing systems fail to offer CFL teachers the useful pedagogical information they need.In view of the shortage of CFL pedagogical dictionaries and the incompleteness of their cross-referencing systems, the researcher attempted to structure a cross-referencing system by referring to the research findings on CFL vocabulary teaching and recognition and drawing on the cross-referencing practice in some successful English learner’s dictionaries (ELDs) as well as some quality Chinese dictionaries for native Chinese speakers and for CFL learners.Specifically, two major empirical studies were conducted. Firstly, a questionnaire survey was carried out to investigate the cross-referencing needs of CFL teachers and how they expect the cross-references to be presented. Secondly, in order to gain experiences of structuring the cross-referencing system in learner’s dictionaries, a dictionary text study was carried out to investigate in detail the cross-reference types and their presentations in five ELDs, one Chinese dictionary for native speakers and five CFL learner’s dictionaries.. Meanwhile, the feasibility of the mental lexicon theory for figuring out exactly the essential elements of an ideal cross-referencing system is also examined.With the empirical data obtained from the two surveys, the researcher analyzed the elementary and intermediate CFL teachers’expectations and requirements concerning the cross-referencing system in the CFL pedagogical dictionary. It was found that CFL teachers welcomed diverse types of cross-references in the CFL teaching dictionary. They also gave the following practical suggestions, with regard to which characters and words should be introduced by using cross-references to elementary and intermediate CFL learners:1) The words and characters worth introduction by cross-referencing to students should be frequently used in daily communication;2) Learners’ ability should always be considered when determining what words and characters to introduce;3) For most students, the words and characters fit to be introduced are limited and should be confined to those included in the wordlist of the textbook. In other words, over introduction of words should be avoided.These suggestions imply that the CFL teachers do not actually expect much of the elementary and intermediate CFL learners. Nevertheless, the CFL pedagogical dictionary should provide sufficient information for CFL teachers and a complete cross-referencing system is a must. Only by doing this can a CFL pedagogical dictionary help achieve the desired CFL teaching objective.Furthermore, the dictionary text study indicates that1) ELDs in general have a more complete cross-referencing system and provide valuable implications and experiences for structuring the cross-referencing system in the CFL pedagogical dictionary;2) Despite some lexicographical innovations, CFL learner’s dictionaries tend to follow the practice of Chinese dictionaries for native Chinese speakers and fail to provide sufficient cross-reference information for CFL learners or teachers. It means that the actual needs of CFL learning or teaching does not receive due attention in the compilation of CFL learner’s or pedagogical dictionaries.Based on the empirical studies and the considerations of mental lexicon theory, the researcher structured a tentative cross-referencing model for the CFL pedagogical dictionary. This model, inspired partly by Cui’s division of five subsystems of a language (2004), consists of four categories of cross-references as follows:1) Semantic cross-references:cross-reference for synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and Chinese characters without independent meaning;2) Formal cross-references:cross-reference for picto-phonetic characters, words whose characters are in mutually reverse order, and backward-sequence words;3) Phonetic cross-references:cross-reference for homophonous characters, homophonous words, polyphonic characters, and near homophonous words;4) Cross-references for inter-lingual discrimination:cross-reference for Chinese word that have the same equivalent in a certain foreign language.The present study has some theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically speaking, it provides a comprehensive account of the ideal cross-referencing system in CFL pedagogical lexicography. And a theoretical model for structuring the cross-referencing system in CFL pedagogical dictionaries for elementary and intermediate learners is a major contribution. Practically, it offers CFL lexicographers helpful suggestions on which types of cross-references to provide and how to present them in CFL pedagogical dictionaries, which are also useful in the context of compiling CFL learner’s dictionaries.