RESEARCHING BRAZILIAN STUDENTS’ NEEDS AND PROPOSING LEXICOGRAPHICAL SOLUTIONS FOR PORTUGUESE-ENGLISH LEARNER’S DICTIONARIES. In Variedades do Léxico, 2016. ISBN: 978-85-69395-04-1 (original) (raw)

It is common knowledge that Bilingual Pedagogical Dictionaries for production have to consider students’ encoding needs (Tarp, 2006), (Zgusta, 2006), that is to say, they have to contain more comprehensive and more systematic information about words (JACKSON, 2002, p. 84). Grammar and syntactic information are more needed than it is usually assumed; they are essential to clarify syntactic possibilitites and determine sentence structure and meaning accuracy (Wiegand 1985, apud WELKER, 2006). Among those, the most important grammatical information for encoding is given for verbs, since they are the pivotal element of sentences and to a large extent determine the syntax of the clause or sentence in which they occur (JACKSON, 2002, p.136). In this context, contrastive linguistics (CL), more specifically error analysis (EA) and contrastive analysis (CA) are valuable methods of investigation. Contrastive linguistics has been heavily attacked because its first objective was to identify points of contrast between pairs of languages in order to preview and to suppress language learners’ difficulties. Recent studies on error analysis have brought a new and more reasonable view to the contrastive linguistics theory. Since then, it has become a reliable source for understanding student’s needs and mother-language/target-language reference association. Currently, researchers rely on error analysis as the starting point for a CL investigation. EA can detect, describe and possibly help explain deviant utterances in foreign language learning, which may be due to divergences between the source and the target language (HARTMANN, 2007, p.18). EA followed by CA has proven to be an assertive way to improve solutions to the problem of establishing translation equivalents (HARTMANN, 2007, p.18) which goes beyond the lexical-semantic relation and introduces the so needed morfo-syntactical information. In the case of Portuguese – English verbs, as shown in this paper, it was very effective.