Some of the 25 topics listed are Answering the Question (e.g. The first group consists of the Oxford Academic Writing Tutor. In addition to the main part of the dictionary that contains the dictionary entries, there are two groups of resources put in the back matter of the dictionary. adjective + measurement accurate, precise,… verb + measurement include, require,… and measurement + noun error, bias, … Consequently, the users have a number of well-grouped options or words to use when they want to write a text using the word measurement. In the entry of measurement, OLDEA does not only list the collocations, but they are integrated in the patterns, for example. In addition to the examples, the users are also assisted in the text production with a list of collocations and word patterns.
#Oxford learner dictionary english definition how to
Examples are very important in helping learners determine the correct use of a word (Chan 2012) and strengthen users’ understanding of how to use the word in text production (Kwary and Miller 2013). There are 50,000 corpus-based example sentences accompanying the 22,000 words, phrases and meanings. The number of example sentences provided in the OLDEA is more than the number of entries. In the case of text production, we can find example sentences, collocations, and word patterns. This is smaller than the number of words in the defining vocabulary of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Turnbull 2010), which contains 3000 words. In the case of text reception, the definitions are written using a limited number of defining vocabulary, i.e. The entries in the OLDEA contain the components that are useful for both text reception and text production. Perhaps the frequency of annuity in the Oxford Corpus of Academic English (the corpus used to draw up the headword list) is lower than that of liquidity and cytoplasm, so the word annuity is not included as a headword in the OLDEA. If we analyze those three words using the academic text in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2015), we can see that the frequencies of annuity, liquidity and cytoplasm, are 527, 323, and 183, respectively. However, there is no entry for annuity, a word which is usually found in business and financial texts. Therefore, in the entries, we can find technical words such as cytoplasm (labelled biology) and liquidity (labelled finance). However, in the inner cover page, there are labels used to show words that are mainly restricted to a particular subject area, for example. In the Introduction, it is mentioned that ‘general academic’ words are the main focus of this dictionary. There seems to be inconsistencies in the OLDEA regarding the headwords included in the dictionary.