Improving the Usage Information Treatment of High Frequently-used Nomitialized Academic Words in English Learner’s Dictionaries

Nominalization is an important phenomenon in the English language, and it hasdrawn much attention from several linguistic schools, and the studies of functionalschool is the most systemic. The major findings of the studies of the schools are,firstly, English nominalizations are mainly used in formal writings and they arefeatured for the discourse function and various collocation types; secondly Englishnominalization differs greatly from Chinese one; thirdly, it is difficult for ChineseEFL learners to acquire English nominalization; fourthly, gerund are greatly differentfrom derivative nominalized words in characteristics. The Academic Word List (AWL)is composed to complete the General Service List and to help English teaching. Of allthe words in AWL,30.54%are nominalized words. The validity and feasibility ofAWL have been demonstrated by many studies, and its importance for Englishlearning has also been explained. According to the studies mentioned above, thewords in AWL are all high frequency words, and therefore their usage informationshould be well treated in English dictionaries which are important tools for ChineseEnglish as Foreign Language (EFL) learning. However, few lexicographic studieshave been done to find out how nominalized words are treated in English learner’sdictionaries.In this thesis, five bilingualized dictionaries from Big Five and three domesticEnglish dictionaries are selected,17nominalized words,10%of all the nominalizedwords in AWL, are selected randomly, and then dictionary survey is done from threeaspects in the eight English learner’s dictionaries: collocation information, registerinformation, discourse function, and next based on the problems from the dictionarysurvey, corpus studies are done. It is found that nominalized words from AWL areundertreated in the three aspects in the eight learner’s dictionaries:(1) collocationtypes are not enough;(2) labeling for register information is not enough;(3) discourse function of nominalized words are seriously ignored. In respect of the above problems,strategies for improvement are proposed and a better model for treating usageinformation of nominalized words is established.