© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. A case for bilingual learners’ dictionaries Robert Lew and Arleta Adamska-Salaciak This article makes a case for bilingual learners’ dictionaries. These dictionaries are very different from traditional bilingual dictionaries, being attuned to the productive needs of learners who are speakers of a specific L1. Although they have been around for some time now, teachers of English remain largely unaware of their benefits (or, possibly, their existence), continuing to promote the one-size-fits-all monolingual English learners’ dictionaries (MELDs) as the best choice for their students. As practising lexicographers, we cannot fail to appreciate the excellence of the leading MELDs, but, as we try to show, there are important respects in which even the best monolingual dictionary cannot assist a foreign language learner. We also explain why bilingualized dictionaries (adaptations of MELDs) are not a viable alternative to custom- designed bilingual learners’ dictionaries when it comes to helping students speak or write in English. Our arguments are illustrated by sample entries taken from dictionaries for speakers of Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese learning English; some more examples of bilingual learners’ dictionaries for speakers of different languages are given in the Appendix. Dictionaries play a vital role in language learning and teaching, not least because they promote learner autonomy. Since asking the (human) teacher is not always an option, a well-chosen dictionary may well be the next best thing when it comes to tackling lexical problems encountered in the process of language learning. The ability to solve such problems quickly is generally believed to be the primary advantage of using dictionaries. Surveys show that when selecting their dictionaries, learners tend to rely on the recommendations of their teachers, who more often than not recommend monolingual English learners’ dictionaries (MELDs) (for example Béjoint 1981; Ryu 2006). Yet teachers of English have often been confused about the actual strengths and weaknesses of the different types of dictionaries available. For quite some time, the dominant orthodoxy was to push learners to use monolingual dictionaries as early as possible, in an attempt to entirely eliminate their L1 from the learning process, a view which has increasingly been questioned (Hall and Cook 2012; Augustyn 2013), and for good reasons. Introduction ELT Journal Volume 69/1 January 2015; doi:10.1093/elt/ccu038 47 Advance Access publication July 29, 2014 by guest on October 16, 2016 http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from