Dictionaries for University Students: A Real Deal or Merely a Marketing Ploy?

Universities in English-speaking countries have experienced a sharp rise in the number of students in the past decades. One of the biggest problems students face is learning how to communicate in academic English, a language they have not experienced before. One of the tools that students often use to tackle language-related problems during their study is a dictionary. There are many dictionaries on the market, but only a few claim to be designed specifically for university students. This paper takes a closer look at these few dictionaries, and attempts to identify their unique features by comparing them with general dictionaries. The analysis reveals that the only real difference lies in the additional material-e.g. sections on academic writing, and not in the dictionary macrostructure or microstructure itself. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the features that dictionaries for university students share with general dictionaries, such as being based on corpus data, and discusses why many of these features cannot actually be acknowledged as studentfriendly. The final remarks point out that publishers, researchers, and lexicographers need to acknowledge that students are a specific group of dictionary users-users that need help, not only with regard to general language, but also with academic language.

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