Название: A Frequency Dictionary of British English: Core Vocabulary and Exercises for Learners
Автор: Vaclav Brezina, Dana Gablasova
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2024
Страниц: 353
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 13.8 MB

A Frequency Dictionary of British English provides information about the frequency and distribution of words in British English.

The dictionary presents rich information about word frequencies and distributions in an accessible manner. In addition to textual and numerical information, the dictionary offers a range of visualisations to help understand the statistical properties of words. These visualisations are especially important for pedagogical uses of the book. This book also includes vocabulary exercises for learners of English to activate their vocabulary with the help of the dictionary. The dictionary is based on extensive research on current British English using the British National Corpus 2014, a 100-million-word corpus of contemporary British English developed at Lancaster University. The corpus represents a wide range of genres/registers of spoken and written English, including informal speech, fiction, newspapers, academic writing and e-language.

Additional support materials for this book are available at site.

Who is this dictionary for?
This dictionary is designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of users interested in current British English vocabulary including students, educators, journalists, material developers and researchers. The dictionary presents in an accessible manner rich information about word frequencies and distributions. In addition to textual and numerical information, the dictionary offers a range of visualisations to help understand the statistical properties of words. These visualisations are especially important for pedagogical uses of the book.

Specifically, frequency distributions of words across genres/registers are visualised in the form of sparklines, that is, small graphs (bar charts) of the size of a word, and selected collocations are displayed as collocation graphs (see Introduction to Chapter 2). At the end of Chapter 2, twenty thematic boxes are included, drawing users’ attention to semantic fields such as ‘Food and drink’, ‘Money and business’, ‘Climate and weather’ and other important features such as ‘Punctuation marks’, ‘Length of words’ and ‘Multi-word expressions’. To support active engagement with the dictionary, Chapter 6 offers a series of exercises suitable for both beginner and more advanced language learners. The vocabulary exercises are designed to draw users’ attention to different aspects of lexical knowledge with reference to the information included in the dictionary. In this way, they offer a variety of pathways into the material presented in the dictionary.