This book deals with the problem of foreign language lexicography. It is concerned with the lack of adequacy between, on the one hand, current reference works and, on the other, the learners' needs. These needs have been insufficiently investigated and this book suggests that the lack of substantial results in the area is due to a flawed research methodology. It is suggested that a qualitative type of research, instead of a quantitative one, should yield better results. A sample of this kind of qualitative analysis, carried out on dictionary examples, bears out that dictionaries would gain with a separation of the encoding and decoding parts. This had already been suggested by a few researchers in the past, but only at a theoretical level. A series of practical consequences of this separation are then considered and, as a result, recommendations are formulated for the compiling of dictionaries in the future. These recommendations are intended mainly to improve the encoding part of the dictionary.Table of ContentsIntroduction 15CHAPTER 1 Dictionaries, History And Learners' Needs 291. The History of Dictionaries 292. Learner's Dictionaries 333. Bilingual Dictionaries 364. Bilingualised Dictionaries 375. The Longman Language Activator 38CHAPTER 2 Review Of Litterature 411. Dictionary Use and Users 'uestionnaires and Experiments 411. uestionnaires 422. Criticism of uestionnaires 433. Controlled Experiments 454. Atkins and Varantola 465. Hilary Nesi's Research on Examples 482. Dictionaries and Computers 503. The Need for a New Kind of Research 53CHAPTER 3 Examples: The Core Of Foreign Language Lexicography 551. General Considerations 551. The Research on Examples 552. Types of Examples 583. The Function of Examples 614. Examples for Decoding and Examples for Encoding 612. Examples in Learner's Dictionaries. The Problem of Collocation andSyntax. 621. Classification 622. Decoding 633. Encoding 654. Requirements for examples 693. Cobuild and Authentic vs. Made-Up Examples 781. The Defence of 'Authentic Language' 792. Criticisms of Cobuild and the Authentic Examples Policy 803. Corpora 814. The Didactic Point of View 814. Examples in Bilingual Dictionaries. 841. The Examples for Road in Collins Spanish-English 862. The Examples for Road in Oxford-Hachette 93CHAPTER 4 An Integrated Approach To Foreign Language Lexicography 971. Decoding 1001. Morphology and Multi-Word Items 1032. Idioms and Collocations 1043. Polysemy 1064. Including the Context: Two Experiments. 1142. Encoding 1231. Introduction 1242. Encoding for Beginners 1243. Polysemy 1064. Including the Context: Two Experiments. 1142. Encoding 1231. Introduction 1242. Encoding for Beginners 1243. Encoding for Advanced Learners 131Concluding Remarks 161Glossary 165Appendixes 170Bibliography 189