English learners’ dictionaries in Australia: a challenge to publishers? Julia Miller 1. Introduction For most of us, a dictionary is a useful, if not an indispensable, part of studying another language. While communicative approaches to language teaching may lead teachers to discourage dictionary use in the classroom (Wright 1998: 10), it is plain to all language teachers that students use dictionaries. This being the case, the use of a monolingual learners’ dictionary (LD) is encouraged by teachers (Miller 2008), and five major English learners’ dictionaries are available in Australia. These are the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD), the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary (COBUILD), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (MEDAL) and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD). There is currently no specifically Australian dictionary for advanced learners of English, as the Macquarie Learners’ Dictionary (1999) is now out of print. The other LDs mentioned above are produced in the UK for a primarily British market. Although they reflect different varieties of English, British English is given the greatest prominence, followed by American English. This is understandable, given the large numbers of speakers of these two varieties. However, it puts those who are studying in other countries, such as Australia, at a disadvantage, as there is sometimes a mismatch in lexical items and cultural references. Australian English has developed over the last 200 years, but the actual term ‘Australian English’ was not used until the 1940s, when it was introduced by Mitchell (Delbridge 2001: 311). Over the years, Australian English has become distinguishable from the varieties of English spoken by different ethnic groups within Australia and by the Aboriginal community (Collins and Blair 2001). It has been enriched by loan words from many other languages (such as Chinese, Italian and Greek), introduced via members of Australia’s multicultural community. According to Dixon, Ramson and Thomas (1980 in Moore 2001), there are also about 400 words in Australian English borrowed from 80 Aboriginal languages. Australian English is thus distinct as a variety. The British LDs label some expressions as Australian, but since dictionaries reflect culture (Dalgish 1995) it is inevitable that an LD produced for the British English market will concentrate on British cultural items and practices. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings for learners. Algeo (1995) gives the example of football defined in its British sense of soccer, but not recognising the different referent understood by an American (or in this case, Australian) native speaker of English. A learner in Australia will therefore not necessarily find the information they need in order to decode and encode words and expressions efficiently. One area that may reflect particular cultural bias is that of idioms. The definition of the word idiom is a complex area of phraseology (see, for example, Cowie 1998, Makkai 1972, Moon 1998, Peters 2007), and is not the main focus here. In this paper, I take the simple explanation of an idiom as a multi-word expression which is ‘more than the sum of its parts’ (Hanks 2004). For example, the expressions carry/take coals to Newcastle and back of Bourke mean, respectively, perform a superfluous action (British English) and somewhere very remote (Australian English). These idioms are opaque in the sense that they do not literally mean what they say. Idioms may have varying degrees of opacity, depending on the age of the idiom and the knowledge of the speaker. They may also be used more frequently Julia Miller page 1