FW: ADS visibility

[Frank Abate]

Lynne M makes a good point.  One problem is that in the noncollege
classroom, one has to get the attention of kids who likely are more used to
looking things up online, not in books.  This is merely anecdotal, but I've
been told by grade school teachers that they cannot easily get their kids to
use the book dictionaries that are already in the classrooms.  The younger
set has become enamored of online reference tools, and changing their habits
will not be easy.

The idea of dictionary training in grade schools is worth pursuing.  One
needs to go to the school administrators, I think, and see what the reaction
is.  Then be ready to teach about online tools, and introduce the book along
the way.  Fortunately, there are several excellent American dictionaries
online and on CD, so the products are out there.

I tend to look things up a lot in my work, and have been at it for a while,
going back to high school.  I am pretty fast it at by now, but I still
believe that 8 times out of 10, one can find a specific alphabetic entry
faster in a book than in an electronic dictionary, even if it is open in the
background on one's computer.  And of course it is much easier to read from
a page than a screen, thanks to the hugely better contrast and resolution of
printed pages.  The advantage of the electronic products comes more in the
ability to search across the entire text using Boolean tools.  But for the
majority of instances for which most "laypeople" use dictionaries -- to
check spelling, meaning, and word division -- the book is better, being
faster, much cheaper, more readily accessible, and requiring no electricity.

Frank Abate

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Lynne Murphy
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 5:39 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: ADS visibility


--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