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1 THE POOR DICTIONARY USE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN MBUJIMAYI: SOME THEOR

1 THE POOR DICTIONARY USE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN MBUJIMAYI: SOME THEORETICAL REASONS By TSHIMANGA BUKASA Franklin Master in Applied Linguistics and PhD Candidate at the University of Kinshasa 2021 2 Résumé Dans un autre article soumis à cette même revue, l’auteur décrit la situation de l’utilisation du dictionnaire dans l’apprentissage de la langue anglaise par les élèves de 5è année des humanités (désormais 3è année) dans la ville de Mbujimayi. Le dictionnaire et sa consultation pour l’apprentissage n’ont pas été remarqués pour des causes tantôt socio- économiques, tantôt psychopédagogiques. Pour confirmer la responsabilité de l’enseignant et expliquer les causes de celle-ci, l’auteur vient de passer en revue deux points de vue des spécialistes assez divergents sur l’utilisation et intégration du dictionnaire dans les activités d’apprentissage de la langue anglaise. Il ressort de cette étude qu’un courant des spécialistes dans l’ Enseignement de l’Anglais comme langue Seconde ou Etrangère recommande aux enseignants de développer chez l’apprenant les aptitudes lui permettant de deviner par déduction le sens des mots nouveaux rencontrés dans un texte, soit par les repères contextuelles ou par celles morphologiques. Ces experts rejettent soit totalement ou en grande partie l’utilisation du dictionnaire. Le deuxième courant soutient et recommande l’utilisation du dictionnaire comme outil d’enseignement de la langue dont le contenu riche et varié permet aux usagers d’apprendre effectivement. Après analyse, l’auteur confirme que le premier courant des spécialistes serait à la base de la quasi-inexistence de l’utilisation du dictionnaire dans les écoles. A ce courant s’ajoute l’incompréhension des critiques contre la méthode ‘Grammar- Translation’. Recommandation est donc faite aux enseignants d’intégrer la consultation du dictionnaire dans leur didactique et aux décideurs d’implémenter la culture du dictionnaire. Summary As a follow-up to “Exploring the Dictionary Use in ELL/ELT Practices in Mbujimayi” (paper submitted to this journal and where the author describes the absence of the dictionary use at secondary school), this paper is intended to find out the theoretical causes of the dictionary use ignorance by the teachers of English. In it, two sets of literature in the field of ELT are examined, viz. texts rejecting the dictionary use and those suggesting it. As a matter of fact, some authors suggest alternatives to the dictionary use to help readers cope with difficult words. Namely, guessing or inferring the meaning of new words through the contextual clues or the morphological ones is the skill teachers should develop in the learners. This view and the association of the dictionary use with the Grammar- Translation Method are the causes of the rejection or death of the dictionary use. By contrast, 3 another set of authors favour the dictionary which they think can solve lexical problems better than guessing. After the confrontation of this controversial literature, the author points out that the techniques suggested as alternatives to dictionary use are good but partially likely to solve lexical problems as all guesses are not always successful or accurate. Taking into account the viewpoint of those who suggest the recourse to the dictionary when guessing fails, the author recommends the dictionary use instead of wasting time and energy with guess trials which are not absolutely accurate. Dictionaries solve more than meaning problems and learners should learn from them. And so are teachers recommended to integrate the dictionary use in their classroom activities and decision makers invited to contribute to the implementation of the dictionary culture. Key-words: dictionary use, language pedagogy, alternatives to the dictionary use, dictionary culture. 1. Introduction In another paper entitled “Exploring the Dictionary Use in ELL/ELT Practices in Mbujimayi” submitted to this journal for publication, I have demonstrated through empiricism that dictionaries are not used in the learning/teaching of English as a foreign language in Mbujimayi. Among the reasons pointed out, teachers were seen to ignore the integration of the dictionary use in their language pedagogy. To confirm that the poor dictionary use state is actually a pedagogical problem and back up the results from that field investigation, I delve into this issue to find out if really the dictionary use is not suitable with language teaching methods. This will help teachers and schools have a clear idea about the dummy conflict that would exist between dictionary use and English language teaching/learning. To achieve this target, two sets of writings in the field of language teaching will be overviewed, i.e. those disfavouring dictionary use and those recommending it. After confrontation, my aim is to demonstrate that the conflict or mismatch is but apparent, show how it might have affected teachers of English, and strongly advise improvements. That is, language teachers, learners and the education partners in Mbujimayi should give privilege and/or priority to dictionary use in class as a means for teaching the English language with a hopeful view to achieve learning autonomy. The decision makers and the community will also be recommended to take a decisive action to participate through the implementation of the 4 dictionary culture to improvement of the dictionary use and the practitioners’ attitudes in the area of this study. 2. Methodology This piece of research examines the opinions in the literature concerning teaching English with(out) the dictionary use. These opinions will be identified and selected randomly (depending on their availability to me) just to find out whether they favour or disfavour the use of the dictionary in the teaching of English as a foreign or second language. Besides, the controversial viewpoints are overviewed and confronted to pinpoint different motivations. Finally, this paper will judge how relative or absolute, partial or complete, biased or valid those considerations or opinions might be to contribute to the effective use of the dictionary for language learning/teaching. It is worth mentioning that the aim is not to cover all the existing literature, but to collect opinions from the accessible data or sources available and interpret correctly these opinions to guide the understanding and action of English language teaching practitioners. 3. Scholars’ Opinions on Teaching English with (out) the Dictionary Use 3.1. Teaching/Learning English without the Dictionary Use Many theoreticians and practitioners of EFL /ELL, especially in areas such as reading and vocabulary learning/teaching, have advised teachers to train their language learners to develop strategies and mechanisms helping them to understand meanings with no recourse to dictionaries. In the following lines, these opinions will be reviewed chronologically with a special focus on how they disfavour the consultation of the dictionary by the learners during some language learning activities. Ellison (1966:59, 236; 1968) recommends four techniques for one to cope with strange new words encountered in a text. First, the reader may skip the difficult word in order to guess its meaning of the sentence without that word. Second, the reader may try to figure out the meaning of new words through the context. The context of a word, according to Ellison (1966:59), is what is written or spoken together with the word or the other words around it. In a sentence like The clock’s hands are broken, the exclusion of the hand as a part of the human body is made possible by the possessor “clock”. Third, the meaning of the new word may be found through its morphological clues. The morphological parsing helps to find the meaning of words through word parts. The knowledge of the negative meaning of the 5 prefix “in-“and the meaning of the suffix “-able” are supposed to help the learner guess the meaning for words like “incomparable”. Finally, readers are advised to consult the dictionary after having tried all the preceding techniques. The same viewpoints have been recapitulated in Ellison (1968). Bright and McGregor (1970: 56) also support that meaning inferences are applied from both contextual and internal clues without reference to a dictionary. For Grellet (1981), the reader’s mind should be so stiffened that s/he should not stumble on every difficulty and get discouraged. In other terms, Grellet suggests the reader of a text containing difficult words not to stop on each new word and look for its meaning with the obvious risk of losing the interest in the reading activity or being discouraged. Instead, readers should draw from contexts and morphological clues to find the meaning of the sentence without the new word or understand the new word through its individual parts. This is sensitizing and deduction of meaning, techniques of meaning extraction discussed in Tshimanga (2012:57). Richards and Rodgers (1999:4) lists the dictionary use among the characteristics of the Grammar Translation Methods as the following quote shows: Vocabulary selection is based solely on the reading texts used, and words are taught through bilingual word lists, dictionary study, and memorization. In a typical Grammar-Translation text, the grammar rules are presented and illustrated, a list of vocabulary items are presented with their translation equivalents, and translation exercises are prescribed. The grammar Translation Method is described as the worst of the language teaching methods not to be used nowadays. As it will be said later, the dictionary use is frequent in this old-fashioned method and that might have contributed to the death of the dictionary use uploads/Litterature/ tshimanga-bukasa-the-dictionary-use-in-english-language-teaching-in-mbujimayi-the-state-of-the-art.pdf