Exemplification Policy In CELD For Chinese EFL Learners

CELDs for Chinese EFL Learners are important learning tool assisting the Chinese learners in learning English.Exemplifications in a learner's dictionary are of great importance and they mainly fulfill the following six functions:accomplishing the definition of lexical units,contextualizing a word in question,distinguishing different senses of a lexical unit,illustrating the grammatical construction of a given word,showing the typical collocations of a given word,instructing the register or style of a lexical unit.This thesis aims at surveying exemplification policy in CELDs and tackling the problems existing so as to modify the policy in detail.The exemplification policy involves various aspects:such as type,number,distribution,arrangement,typicality of examples and additional expressions.Learners' reaction to the exemplification policy is the starting point of modifying the policy and the testing criterion as well.Thus,a survey has been conducted to investigate the EFL learners' attitudes towards present CELDs' exemplification policy and the modified policy.A case study concerning the four mainstream CELDs for Chinese EFL learners has been carried out to examine the exemplification policy in great detail and some of its defects were exposed.The main findings of this part of research are:firstly,the examples in CELDs for Chinese EFL learners should be English equivalent-orientated,but Chinese headword-orientated.That is to say,the examples should be oriented to show the semantic,grammatical and pragmatic information of the English equivalents;secondly,equivalents with comparatively lower frequency rate,complex syntax,and low equative degrees should be highlighted in exemplification equipment and users' reference needs should also be taken into account.Meanwhile,culture-bound words should have more exemplifications which can be presented in a culture bridge module,a module newly added to the CELDs;thirdly,exemplification should focus on learners encoding needs including:the syntactic structure of sentence example should be simpler;the distribution,exemplification equipment and number of additional expressions should be properly treated;the arrangement of exemplifications should adapt to cognitive model;the type of exemplification should be chosen properly;exemplifications should be typical;verb,adjective and preposition should have more exemplifications.As the theoretical support for the modified exemplification policy,the Input hypothesis and the prototype theory were applied.Firstly,Input hypothesis required that users should have enough authentic and "i+1" input to ensure correct output, especially cross-culture knowledge;secondly,prototype theory,as a theory of 'category',was applied in dictionary compilation to give typicality and additional expressions of exemplifications theoretical support.Based on the findings of the present study,a tentative proposal on modifying exemplification policy is put forward.