School Dictionary Entries with a Pedagogical and Linguistic Approach

Abstract

Dictionaries are reference books and online databases that contain information about the meaning of a word and its most correct use in speech. The headwords and definitions of dictionaries vary depending on the target users of the dictionary, the purpose of editing, and the type of dictionary. School dictionaries are works that should be prepared by taking into account pedagogical concerns as well as lexicography and linguistics. A dictionary entry contains a headword and its explanations (definition, grammatical function labels, pronunciation, illustrations, etc.), and this unit is called microstructure in lexicography. This study aims to create a list of what kind of structures (e.g. part of speech labels, example sentences, etc.) an entry in the school dictionary may contain, taking into account linguistic and pedagogical concerns, and then to develop an entry scheme for Turkish school dictionaries based on this list. For this purpose, in our qualitative research, the descriptive method, which is frequently preferred in lexicography studies that determine the current situation in dictionaries, was preferred. The linguistic and pedagogical features included in a school dictionary entry were obtained through content analysis from 3 different languages (Turkish, English and French) and 3 different school dictionaries (Türk Dil Kurumu [TDK], Cambridge and Le Robert) selected as research object. As a result of the study, it was observed that the school dictionary entry contained 6 different structures in the headword part and 21 different structures in the definition part. There are 1 pedagogical and 5 linguistic structures in the headword. There are 10 pedagogical and 11 linguistic structures in the definition. According to the data obtained, the pedagogical structures in school dictionaries were mostly used to make the use of the headword more concrete. For example, while indicating the part of speech functions of a word is a linguistic feature, it is pedagogical to give an example usage that clearly indicates the grammatical function of the word. As a result of this study, it was suggested that Turkish school dictionaries include structures such as illustrations and example sentences that will concretize the headword. Unlike English and French, Turkish has a flexible system in which words can have various grammatical functions, that is, the grammatical function of a word with the same morphological appearance (a word that does not have a special suffix for adverbs or adjectives) changes depending on the context, the importance of including an example sentence indicating each grammatical function of the word has been emphasized. As a result of the research, an ideal school dictionary entry scheme was proposed.