Tadeusz Piotrowski Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna Pedagogical dictionaries of English as commercial products”, w: Studies in honour of Janusz Arabski on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Editor Maria Wysocka. pp. 171-176. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 2009 (No 2701) Pedagogical dictionaries of English as commercial products In this paper I would like to touch on two interrelated issues. One issue is the usefulness of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of English aimed at learners and non- native users of English, the other is the presence of such dictionaries on the marketplace as commercial products, and, more specifically, as brands. In fact there is an ideological, or perhaps realistic, or perhaps cynical, approach that pedagogical dictionaries – especially monolingual ones - are first of all products, created and sold by the publishers to make money (Phillipson 1992, cf. also Kernerman 1999). The needs of users are of secondary importance. If one looks at the available literature on the use of dictionaries in the process of studying English as a foreign language 1 one finding recurs: users prefer bilingual dictionaries to monolingual ones (for reviews of the literature cf. Piotrowski 1994b, Lew 2004, Poluszyński 2006). This finding is quite surprising when one takes into account the effort that has been going on for over sixty years into making the users believe that what they primarily need is a monolingual dictionary. What is even more surprising perhaps is that even though the students apparently do not think they need monolingual dictionaries, there are more and more titles available on the market and the dictionary industry, especially in the UK, seems to flourish. What this seems to indicate is that students (and perhaps teachers) are persuaded into buying a product which they do not use very much, which means that it is highly likely that they do not need it. What is also interesting is that the dictionary use habit seems to be deeply ingrained: students buy dictionaries because they “feel” they need them (Poluszyński 2006). Students prefer bilingual dictionaries over monolingual ones for reasons that I discussed in my 1994 book (Piotrowski 1994b), and in my opinion the arguments are still valid (cf also Lew 2004). In short, in so-called passive use, which dominates, while both the monolingual and the bilingual dictionary can confirm (or not) the hypothesis about the meaning of an item in text (and this is the most important task of dictionary use for users), 1 This relates to other languages as well, however, English is very well researched 1