Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

• Dictionary of Enlish Language and culture
  
• Mindgames (CD Rom)

Editorial Director: Della Summers, Longman, 1992.
Hardback: £25-00
Paperback:£17-95

We often review books hot-off the press but in this issue we are giving first place to a book that came out 8 years ago and which offers a mass of useful cultural information should your students be interested in UK attitudes and behaviours.

In the preface to the dictionary Della Summers writes:

"The full text of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is the basis for the book, but we have included a further 15,000 people, places, events and institutions in order to provide advanced learners of English with a full reference resource in one book.

This is because we believe that when students come across references to Rodeo Drive ,triffids, Reuters/ PSBR/ the Teamsters Union or Clarence Darrow in their reading, they should be able to look them up in their dictionary just as they would other, more general language words. "

On the back of the title page the reader is told:

"The information in the definitions with regard to people, institutions, products and companies, represents the meaning, connotations and associations that English speaking people have, as ascertained by the editorial team on the basis of their professional knowledge, and or citational evidence from newspapers, books and magazines. "

When using this dictionary with students it is important to make clear to them that it sets out to be a guide to British views and opinions of the world and therefore not a dictionary principally concerned with denotative meaning, as many people assume a dictionary will be. In a very real way the Dictionary of Language and Culture is an honest book in the way it tries to report on UK opinion, nationally coloured views, prejudice and mis-information..

Let me give you two examples from the area of history and politics:

Dresden: a city in E Germany known for its china industry, and for being destroyed by bombing in 1945. When people want to give an idea of something delicate and beautiful but easily damaged they sometimes mention a Desden shepherdess.

This entry accurately indicates that British people do not labour under any sense of guilt when they think back to the terrifying fire-bombing of Dresden, perhaps Churchill's most heinous war crime in the 1939-45 period.

If you look up the entry for Allende, the Chilean president from 1970 to 1973, you will see that he was, in early editions of the dictionary, described as a "communist". Now this is inaccurate information and Della Summers has acknowledged this ( he was a life-long socialist ), but it is probably accurate of the attitude of many British people who were fed this sort of dis-information by the US media at the time. In this case the dictionary was accurate about the British view of the fact, despite the reality being different. This dictionary is about the Brits think and feel, not about objective reality.

It is not surprising that a middle class team of lexicographers, working from magazines and books written by middle class people, mostly, should demonstrate these attitudes in the way they write their entries. Take Wembley and Wimbledon:

Wembley: a place in London with a large stadium where important sports events such as the FA cup final are held every year. There is also a large hall there used for popular musical concerts.

Wimbledon: an important tennis competition which takes place every summer in the part of London called Wimbledon at the All England Club. Wimbledon is considered to be typically English and rather old fashioned and is an important social occasion as well as being a sporting event. It is traditional to eat strawberries and cream and drink champagne or Pimms. People often joke about the fact that it often rains during Wimbledon " her first Wimbledon final - rain has delayed the start of play at Wimbledon.

If you are teaching UK culture the above two entries are attitudinal jems and advanced students love discovering the information about class attitudes that the book abounds with. The Wembley entry is cold, accurate, denotational and written in a distanced way. The entry writers show no emotional involvement with what they are describing - they are not speaking about their world. That is the world of football, of hooligans and of loud pop concerts.

Wimbledon clearly is part of their world, down to the strawberries, cream, champagne and Pimms. While Wembley is a place Wimbledon is an event. The entry is very English, culturally, in that the writers mention that "people often joke about the rain stopping play " - there is no question, in the writers' minds, about the idiocy and inefficiency having no roof covering over the courts in a country with weather as volatile as the UK's. It is pretty consonant with British attitudes and behaviour to meekly accept the unacceptable and then to use humour to reduce the pain.

If you happen to be teaching an international class then the country entries below are food for much thought and discussion. I have asked students to look at these entries as well to check out the entries for their own countries.

Austria: a country in Central Europe; capital Vienna

Switzerland: a country in W. Europe; capital Bern; population 6,647,000 (1989). It is known for having remained neutral in two world wars, and being the base of international groups such as the Red Cross. It is also a world centre for banking and the management of money and famous for its chocolate and its cheese, and for making clocks and watches.

Lybia: an oil producing country in N. Africa on the Mediterrranian Sea; capital Tripoli; population 4,3855,000 (1989). It is generally unfriendly to the US and Britain.

France: a country in W. Europe that has a democratic government and is a member of the European Community; capital Paris; population 56,160,000. In Britain, France is know esp. for its good food and drink, esp. its wines.

Germany: a country in central Europe, divided from 1945 until 1990 into West Germany and East Germany; capital Berlin; population 78,620,000 (1990)

Holland see Netherlands

Netherlands: (the) a country in N.W Europe. The capital is Amsterdam but the government is at the The Hague; population; 14,835.000 (1989). Most of the country is flat and much of it is below the level of the sea. Its people, (the Dutch) have enclosed and drained parts of the sea to get more land. Although Holland is only one part of The Netherlands, most people say Holland when they mean the whole country. People connect The Netherlands with windmiulls, tulips and wooden shoes ( clogs).

Belgium: a country in N.W. Europe; capital Brussels; population 9,932,000 (1989).

New Zealand: a country consisting of two main islands ( North Island and South Island) and some smaller ones, the Pacific Ocean SE of Australia: capital Wellington; population 3,312,000 (1989 ) It is known mainly for its farming esp lamb, meat and butter. The population, is mainly of British origin, with some Maori people who were the first settlers there.

I have sometimes invited students to pick one entry, say the one above on New Zealand, and go to other sources, especially internet searches, to check and expand the information. These could be interesting questions:

How many Maori and part-Maori people are there in New Zealand today?
Were the Maoris the very first inhabitants of these lands? What is "settler" intended to mean?
How many Polynesian immigrants are there in New Zealand today?
Can you think of any other "diagonal "countries which are misleadingly referred to as having a North and a South part?
What do the entry writers mean by the word " meat " in the string "lamb, meat, butter ?

A very good rolling exercise is to simply give the dictionary to one student and ask them, for home work, to pick out any six words and come ready to talk about them in the following lesson. They come up with fascinating things both about UK attitudes to their country and culture and things about UK. I call this a "rolling" exercise as you can ask a different student to do this kind of free homework over a term, and thus have a "thread" of dictionary work running through each class.

This dictionary is not just a handy reference book. If you get students to de-construct it they will find a gold mine of information , of UK attitudes and UK prejudice.

It is a must on your culture shelves and I am very pleased I brought the more expensive hardback, given the way its pages have been plied by my students and by me.

by Isobel Fletcher de Tellez and Mario Rinvolucri
pubished by Clarity, 1999 <info@clarity.com.hk>

This game teaches the following useful, predictable areas of language:

The game also ventures into areas that are less frequently explored in classrooms such as:

How does the game work?

One of the things I like about this package is that the game is easy to learn to play. To win an opponent's piece, you have to trap it. To trap simply means to have place one of your pieces so that the enemy piece is caught between two of your pieces , like this:

Now the enemy piece is trapped you have to do the language work. Suppose the enemy piece has the word "Swedish" on it, and suppose you are playing a game where you are contrasting languages with nationality nouns.
You need to type in the nationality noun that corresponds to " Swedish". If you type in "Swede" the enemy piece flips over and become one of your men. If you type in " Swedian" you do not get to "capture" the piece.

As you can see the whole game works on binary opposites and, in the Teacher booklet that goes with the CD rom, the authors suggest that you can teach all sorts of binary opposites:

Why do they offer so little work in the semantic area?

The nature of the game invites you to think of language in terms of binary oppositions and I am surprised that the authors have not gone for areas like semantic opposites and synonyms. They could have offered the students pairs like

When you come to think about it, though, Mindgame players probably want one right answer and words have a way of having more than one opposite.

Take short : its opposites include: long, tall, polite/courteous/( to be short with somebody) to work normally ( to short, electrically )

It's a pity, though, that the authors did not find a logical and satisfying way of using Mindgame to get students thinking about semantic categories.

Isn't translation the obvious area in which to use Mindgame's ludic power?

When you stand back from test-playing this game and reading the teacher bumf which goes with it then its obvious use is between mother tongue and the target language. What they have put on the Cdrom ranges from the centrally useful to the more peripheral but why is the idea of translation only briefly mentioned in the teacher's handbook? There they suggest you can use the authoring programme ( I found this very easy to use ) to input words in English and their mother tongue equivalents. What a brilliant way of learning lexis fast and effortlessly, a way as fun for 6 year olds as for 66 year-olds.

They should have up-fronted the translation option and offered us games ready to play in this area. They could at least have prepared half-ready vocabulary games with individual teachers only having to author in the mother tongue words. This would have saved users time. Even better, the authors could have suggested the students authoring in the mother tongue words prior to playing the game.

Let us hope that Fletcher de Tellez, Rinvolucri and Clarity realise that the real potential of their idea lies in bi-lingual CD Roms , maybe presented as an integral part of a coursebook package. I wish I had had a bi-lingual package for vocab work when I was teaching monolingual groups of Japanese back in the early 1990's.