Lexical layers 2: connotation

In my last post, I talked about the importance of delving beyond the surface meaning of new vocabulary to try and help learners understand where and when it's appropriate to use a particular word or phrase. I looked at the concepts of register and genre, and how certain words are more typical of particular contexts and stand out as odd (or 'marked') when they're used elsewhere.

A couple of the comments on that post questioned how teachers can find time to cover all this extra information when there's already so much else to fit in. To which my first reaction is perhaps that quality is as important as quantity – there's no point memorizing a whole load of words if you don't know how to use them appropriately! But also, I realized that it's easy when you focus on a specific aspect of learning for it to get blown out of proportion. While I'm saying that understanding beyond the surface of meaning of vocab is really important, I'm not saying that learners and teachers need to go into all this detail with all the words they come across and certainly not all at the same time. Lots of words are fairly neutral and uncontroversial, so it may only be the odd word or phrase here and there that comes with a 'health warning' and needs some extra explanation. And those layers may be peeled back gradually with repeated exposures, adding in a note about register or other kinds of usage as vocab starts to shift from learners' passive to active vocab (pointing out a new aspect of a word is a great way to make revision seem less repetitive). Nonetheless, for those words which are marked in some way, exploring those extra layers can be really key to vocab development.

In this post, the layer I want to explore is connotation or the feeling and attitude of the speaker that particular word choices convey. Take a look at these words and phrases that all refer to a person who's physically larger than normal – what images do they conjure up, who could you apply them to and how would they feel about it?

Adjectives like these tend to be at the more obvious end of the connotation scale, but all kinds of words reveal something about the user and their attitude towards the person or thing they're talking about. To take an example in the news fairly recently, would you describe a person at a climate strike event like the one below as an activist, a campaigner, a protestor, a demonstrator, an agitator, a militant or maybe a troublemaker or even an uncooperative crusty*? 

All these words have slightly different connotations, both in and of themselves, and also depending on who they're used by and applied to. The learner who looks up the equivalent in their L1 on Google translate and randomly picks one of the options they're offered could find themselves getting across a very different message from the one they intended. Incidentally, I looked up activist on Google translate and, ignoring the translations, it offers the English synonyms militant, zealot, protestor, radical, extremist and netroots … the last of which I'd never heard before but apparently comes from a blend of grassroots and internet to describe campaigners who communicate their message online (check out definitions here and here)  … which is a neat word, but clearly has layers of meaning (not to mention lexicogrammar) that you'd need to decode before using it.

Teachers and learners often love the idea of a thesaurus to help expand their vocabulary, but as the example above illustrates, it's a path fraught with danger. Many of the thesaurus tools available online are aimed at L1 speakers of English who are looking for inspiration. It's assumed they'll be familiar with most of the synonyms that crop up and have some idea when it's appropriate (or not) to use them. They are not designed for learners of English and even if they link through to definitions, they'll likely again be written for L1 speakers in a style that won't be of much help to the average learner. Many learner's dictionaries also have thesaurus facilities of some kind, often in the form of clickable synonyms at the bottom of an entry. These can be more helpful, in part, because they're likely to focus on more useful, high-frequency words rather than the often obscure results of L1 tools. What's really important though is that learners understand the importance of clicking through to the definitions to check how the synonym may differ in usage from their starting point. Learner's dictionaries often show connotation through labels such as disapproving or offensive or humorous. Alternatively, these restrictions may be incorporated into the definition itself, e.g. "used to describe someone you disapprove of …".  Or subtler differences may be shown through the choice of examples. I suspect, however, many learners skim over these important caveats, focusing only on the basic meaning (or denotation). Which is why work in class on noticing and understanding the significance of this kind of information is so important.

Of course, though, dictionaries and other reference sources can only give very general guidance on typical usage. People all use and understand language differently. If you're female, for example, how do you feel about people referring to you as a woman, a lady, a girl or a bird? Does it depend on who they are? Have your feelings, like mine, shifted slightly over time? Whether or not you perceive a particular word or expression as formal, informal, slang, old-fashioned, offensive, condescending, complimentary, humorous, appropriate or inappropriate will come down to your social, cultural, regional, educational and professional background, your age, your gender and potentially a whole host of other factors … which I'll talk about in my next post.  

* uncooperative crusties was an expression used by UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to describe people at a climate strike event in London in Oct 2019 (link to BBC news report here)

Online dictionaries: What's wrong with the hippo?

Last weekend I was at an ELT conference in Brussels talking about online dictionaries and digital literacy. Just before my session, I got chatting to one of the other presenters. It turned out that he was presenting at the same time as me so wouldn't be able to come to my session. I briefly explained that I'd be talking about how, with the proliferation of online dictionary sites about, it's important for teachers to help their students find sites that are relevant and useful.

Photo credit: Alexdi at English Wikipedia

He started telling me enthusiastically about a site he loved to use with his students called wordhippo.com. He explained that it contained a whole wealth of information, not just definitions, but lots of synonyms and antonyms too. It wasn't a site that I'd come across, so I quicky checked it out. I was using a couple of key words as examples in my session, so I looked up one of these, sensible, as a quick point of comparison:

Definitions for expert speakers:

I immediately recognized the definitions that popped up as coming from oxforddictionaries.com; they were word-for-word identical. Now lots of dictionary sites quite legitimately license data from big dictionary publishers, but an alarm bell started to tinkle when I couldn't find the source of the definitions credited anywhere on the site. Ethical and legal concerns aside though, from a pedagogical perspective, I was more worried by the fact that the definitions were quite clearly aimed at native/expert speakers, not learners. Unlike learner's dictionaries, which carefully grade the level of the language in definitions - typically using a restricted 'defining vocabulary' to ensure that the words in a definition are less difficult than the word itself - native speaker dictionaries aim to explain the nature of a word in a way that will be useful to an expert speaker of English, but which is often completely inaccessible to an average learner.

Compare these definitions for the first sense of sensible: 

"chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence; likely to be of benefit" (wordhippo.com; originally from oxforddictionaries.com?)

"reasonable, practical, and showing good judgment" (ldoceonline.com)

A bewildering plethora of synonyms:

When I searched for synonyms of sensible, I was faced with a list of 49 possible options, in no clearly discernible order, ranging from the predictable (and useful) reasonable and logical, to obscure and sometimes downright baffling suggestions such as sagacious, cognizant and consequent. I can just see those slotting in naturally to an intermediate learner's essay, can't you?! Any thesaurus or list of synonyms can be a bit of a minefield for even advanced learners, but the longer they are, the more obscure the options and the less information given about each one, arguably the more confusing and problematic they become. The thesaurus facilities available with several of the online learner's dictionaries at least produce more restricted sets of relatively high-frequency alternatives, which students are quite likely to recognize and more realistically make use of.  My personal favourite is the 'Explore thesaurus' feature at macmillandictionary.com which for each sense of a word provides a manageable list of synonyms and related words along with their definitions to help students see right away how the words are similar, and perhaps more importantly, different. At the first sense of sensible, for example, they offer practical, rational, logical, realistic, rightly, sound and mature.

Why do we love the hippo?

I felt a bit bad dissing a site that a fellow professional clearly enjoyed using. As I explained to him though, as expert speakers, it's easy to get drawn in by what appeals to us as fans of the language rather than what might be useful for our students. I admit that as a language nerd that juicy long list of quirky synonyms was fun. I enjoyed skimming through all the words and picking out the ones I wouldn't have thought of and even the ones I'd never heard of - refractory as a synonym of difficult anyone?

When you're looking for an online dictionary to use with or recommend to your learners, you might ask the following questions:

• Is the source of the content clear?
• Is the content designed for language learners?
• Is the content clear, accessible and useful for your learners? 

Chances are, that'll lead you to the sites of the 'big five' learner's dictionaries. There are lots of fascinating dictionary and vocabulary-related websites out there which all have their attractions and uses, but if you're looking for a reliable, appropriate, well-presented resource for your students, I think it's still hard to beat the old favourites.

The 'big five' learner's dictionaries online:

Oxford Learner's Dictionaries

Cambridge Dictionary online

Collins COBUILD

Macmillan Dictionary

Longman English Dictionary online

Get ahead, get a thesaurus

I don’t usually use my blog to ‘plug’ products I’ve worked on, but a couple of things lately have prompted me to think again about a book I was involved with a few years back.  During my recent trip to Munich, a teacher came up to me in the break and asked if I ever recommend a thesaurus to my students. I started to tell her about the Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus … only to find that she was already a convert and couldn’t understand why it doesn’t have a higher profile.

 

The OLT has the usual sets of synonyms you’d expect in a thesaurus, but it also has lots of information for learners to help them understand what each of the words means and, more importantly, where their meanings overlap and how they’re different. It was one of my favourite ever projects to work on – I spent months and months poring over sets of synonyms and trying to tease out all the subtle differences … language nerd paradise!

Anyway, I think it’s a great book, especially for more advanced learners, like the EAP students I teach. They really need to vary their vocabulary, especially when they’re writing longer pieces, to avoid just repeating the same old words and expressions time and again. Letting them loose on an ordinary NS thesaurus though can be a bit of a recipe for disaster as they come up with all kinds of inappropriate substitutions!

I generally try to introduce my classes to the OLT, usually via an example that’s cropped up in class, and encourage them to try it out as a resource.   I even managed to squeeze it into my most recent project; OxfordEAP C1/Advanced  in a module on synonyms (p. 070 if you’ve got a copy).

But I also use it quite a bit as a reference myself both when I’m teaching and when I’m writing. Which brings me onto the second prompt for this blog post … I’ve read a few interesting things on hedging in EAP lately (from Nathan Hall and Ken Paterson -  looking forward to his webinar on hedging tomorrow), which for those of you not familiar with the term, is the way we use language to show how confident (or otherwise) we are about what we’re saying, or to be more EAP about it, to moderate the strength of the claims we’re making. A lot of work on hedging tends to focus on modals (could, might, would), so-called hedging verbs (appear, seem, tend),  adverbs (possibly, perhaps, relatively, significantly) and a few other adverbial expressions (to some extent, on balance). But writers also convey a lot about their stance and evaluation of ideas through their choice of other vocabulary too.

Consider the difference between:

The effectiveness of the programme has been queried/questioned/disputed/criticized/attacked.

It’s an area that you’d probably only tackle explicitly with pretty advanced students, but it’s worth being aware of and picking up on when it crops up (as is the nature of much language work in EAP).  Anyway, when I wanted to include some work on this in Oxford EAP, it was OLT I turned to in search of ideas for the practice exercises (p. 143). Lots of sets of synonyms vary in strength, so when you’re deciding which word to use to express a particular idea, you might make your choice based on how confident or tentative you want to come across as … that’s hedging too.

I'd be interested to hear whether other people use a thesaurus (or the thesaurus facility of some of the learner's dictionaries) - either with their students or for their own reference?