An Empirical Study On Input Enhancement Of Entries In ECLDs

As an approach of highlighting language information, input enhancement hasreceived great attention from SLA researchers. While in the field of lexicography,little research on this topic has been done. Therefore, this thesis, from the userperspective, studies input enhancement of entries in ECLDs through an inputenhancement experiment, an investigation into the existing ECLDs, and contrastiveanalyses between Chinese and English as well as analyses of common errors made bythe Chinese EFL learners on the basis of the CLEC. This study is of great practicalsignificance to the compilation of ECLDs, and can prove the applicability of relevantSLA theories to dictionary compilation.Conclusions can be drawn from the present experiment that the highlightedlexical information and grammatical information in the entries can attract learners’attention, and enhance their short-term memory as well as their long-term memory ofthe target forms, thus producing positive effects on SLA. Although increasingimportance has been attached to input enhancement in current ECLDs, some languageinformation which may pose learning difficulties and easily be ignored by learners isnot enhanced. Moreover, certain enhancement techniques take up too much space.Based on noticing hypothesis, input enhancement hypothesis, and findingsthrough contrastive analyses as well as error analyses, this thesis has established aframework for target forms of input enhancement, as well as a theoretical frameworkwhich illustrates the relationships between dictionary compilers, corpora, ECLDs, andlearners. Furthermore, improvement has been made to the enhancement techniques incurrent ECLDs, such as underlining the vowel sounds of the phonetic scripts,presenting the exemplifications in blue, bolding the collocations and syntacticstructures in the exemplifications, and adding columns to present syntactic patterns.