Construction Of Listening Environment In Electronic Learner's Dictionaries

This thesis tries to draw the distinction between auditory vocabulary andvisual vocabulary in ESL learners' mental lexicon. Auditory vocabulary refers tothose words whose' meanings can be activated by their pronunciations. Visualvocabulary refers to those words whose meanings can be activated by theirspellings. On the basis of this distinction, the thesis surveys the listeningenvironment of the current electronic learner's dictionaries which has thepossibility of representing auditory vocabulary. The survey of listeners'dictionary use in listening comprehension shows that around one-third of theChinese EFL learners use dictionaries in their listening activities. This kind ofneed has been ignored by dictionary compilers. Listeners often try to establishthe connection between sound and meaning when using dictionaries in listeningactivities. That is, they need to acquire a larger auditory vocabulary. Theexperiment shows that the increase of auditory vocabulary contributes to theimprovement of listening comprehension. A listening environment with speechrecognition assess system, various listening exercises and multi-database structureare proposed in electronic learner's dictionaries so as to help listeners acquiremore auditory vocabulary and improve their listening comprehension.