ADS visibility

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Wednesday, September 26, 2001 5:37 pm -0600 Victoria Neufeldt
<vneufeldt at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM> wrote:

> But how can we expect people to know about dictionaries when virtually
> nothing is taught about them in most schools.

But then the question becomes--whose responsibility is it to change this?
When I organized a session on "Dictionaries and the Classroom" for MLA, all
but one of the dozen or so abstracts received (advertised for through DSNA,
ADS, and MLA) were about dictionaries in the college (or grad school)
classroom.  Now, I know I would've received a different set of abstracts if
I had been organizing at the NCTE, but would those abstracts have been
lexicographically informed?  The DSNA formed a taskforce on dictionaries
and the classroom that went no where.  So...what are we doing about the
state of dictionary (and language and dialect) teaching in the grade school
(or even high school) classroom?

Lynne




M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320