Mother-tongue’s Little Helper (The Use of the Monolingual Dictionary of Slovenian in School)

By November 17, 2016,
Page 1317-1324
Author Tadeja Rozman
Title Mother-tongue’s Little Helper (The Use of the Monolingual Dictionary of Slovenian in School)
Abstract The first part of the paper brings a brief overview of how Slovenian curricula and school books for primary and secondary schools incorporate the use of monolingual dictionaries in teaching of Slovenian as the mother tongue. In Slovenia there is no dictionary designed for the school population, with the exception of a few smaller lexicographic teaching materials for the youngest group of primary school children (6-9 years). The Dictionary of Standard Slovenian (Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika, hereafter DSS), currently the only existing general monolingual dictionary of Slovenian, is used in schools. Published in five volumes between 1970 and 1991, DSS is outdated in many aspects and from the viewpoint of use in schools it is even more problematical since it is not suited to the needs and language ability of this particular target audience. Especially problematical are the comprehensibility of the defining language and the comprehensibility of the complicated labelling system, employed to convey the paradigmatic properties of entries and limitations regarding their use. The second part of the paper presents the empirical research which had two aims: on the one hand, to determine how the school population understands various definition types from DSS and how comprehensible the set of its labels is, and, on the other hand, to test several versions of various microstructural elements which should be suited to this particular target audience. The research covers three groups of school population at three different stages of cognitive and language development (10-12, 13-15 and 16-18 years), and the results bring useful information regarding a possible concept of a school dictionary of Slovenian.
Session 7. Dictionary Use
Keywords
BibTex 
@InProceedings{ELX08-133,
	   author = {Tadeja Rozman},
	   title = {Mother-tongue's Little Helper (The Use of the Monolingual Dictionary of Slovenian in School)},
	   pages = {1317-1324},
	   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
	   year = {2008},
	   month = {jul},
	   date = {15-19},
	   address = {Barcelona, Spain},
	   editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
	   publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
	   isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
	}
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