Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)
Geoff Barnbrook: From description to prescription and back again
McArthur (1989, pp. 54-55) identifies a change in the approach to language teaching in Europe and the USA around 1880, mainly as a reaction to three perceived negative aspects of existing methods: a) a dependence on the classical languages b) a bias towards literary and textual study c) the use of formal drills and artificial translation exercises The leaders of this change, including Henry Sweet, Paul Passy, Otto Jespersen, Wilhelm Vietor and Maximilian Berlitz, developed a system of teaching by immersion in the target language which helped create the appropriate conditions for the development of the learners' dictionary as a separate specialised form. Sweet (1899, pp. 140-163) lays down the principles on which dictionaries ought to be constructed if they are to be useful for language learning. He deals with the scope of the dictionary, which 'should be distinctly defined and strictly limited' (p. 141), the usefulness of separate pronouncing dictionaries (p. 144), the need to avoid the superfluity of the contents of some dictionaries, which 'heap up useless material', usually in the form of obsolete words, rare and spurious coinages and encyclopaedic entries (pp. 145-146), the need for conciseness to be taken 'as far as is consistent with clearness and convenience'. In the section dealing with meanings he states: 'The first business of a dictionary is to give the meanings of the words in plain, simple, unambiguous language.' (p. 148). He also stresses the need for quotations (p. 149) and grammatical information relating to the constructions in which words are used. Modern learners' dictionaries seem to incorporate at least some of these principles. The principles themselves do not guarantee that dictionaries will approach the language descriptively rather than prescriptively, but their emphasis on details of usage of words establish a framework for dealing with them as 'activities' rather than simply 'entities', of 'using' them rather than simply 'mentioning' them, and this makes it more difficult for the lexicographer to impose characteristics on the language which it does not possess. The ultimate effect on monolingual English learners' dictionaries of this return to the descriptive approach can be seen in their general reliance on corpora, large computer readable samples of real language use. This method of dictionary compilation, pioneered by Sinclair in the development of CCELD (see Sinclair (ed.), 1987), is 29
