School dictionaries play an important role in a multilingual context and that's why it's important to think about them critically.
Schoollex, an association that focuses on coordinating and promoting research about school dictionaries as well as its users and uses was formed two years ago.
A group of researchers and lexicographers from as far away as Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe recently gathered at Stellenbosch University's Faculty of Education for the second Schoollex seminar.
According to Dr Michele van der Merwe, one of the organisers of the Schoollex seminar and head of the Mobilex programme in the Faculty of Education – a trilingual web-based dictionary developed to provide language support to especially first-year students and in this way improve academic literacy (read more) – school and subject dictionaries are important sources of linguistic information.
"They are regarded as instruments to be used in learning and teaching," she adds.
The aim of the gathering was to bring people – lexicographers and publishers of school dictionaries – together to encourage collaborative research between universities and to bring publishers up to speed with research that has been or is being done.
"It is important that we share new research and identify research projects where collaboration can take place."
Some of the research presented at the meeting focused on the development of a trilingual children’s picture dictionary for Juǀ’hoan speakers, the use of examples in school dictionaries and a critical evaluation of English monolingual school dictionaries in Namibia.
The first presentation, presented by Ms Kerry Jones of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, provided a brief outline regarding the development of a trilingual children’s picture dictionary, written in the San dialect Juǀ’hoan, Afrikaans and South African English. Only approximately 11 000 people still speak this dialect.
In the second presentation Prof Danie Prinsloo of the University of Pretoria argued that a lexicographer should use all lexicographic devices – especially illustrative examples – to their full potential in the compilation of a dictionary.
The last research presentation reported on the preliminary results of an initial stage in a research project aimed at producing a functional English monolingual school dictionary for the junior primary phase in Namibia. It was presented by Prof Herman Beyer of the University of Namibia and Ms Sabine Hancock of the Delta Schule in Windhoek.
