The treatment of compound nouns in bilingual and monolingual dictionaries and EFL learners' interaction with them

Abstract EN

This study reports on the findings of the different treatments of a number of selected spaced compound nouns such as (box office, calf love, case study, closed book, cupboard love,..etc) in two bilingual (English-Arabic) dictionaries (Al-Mawrid and Al-Mughni Al-Kabir, and two monolingual (English-English) dictionaries; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

The study deals with the problems facing users of bilingual dictionaries (EFL learners) in translating the selected compound nouns into Arabic.

The purpose of this is to show whether bilingual dictionaries provide the user with the necessary information in the process of translating these compound nouns.

For this goal, 25 students majoring in English Language and Literature at the University of Jordan were asked to take part in a translation test where they were asked to translate into Arabic, sentences that include compound nouns and indicate the name of the dictionary they used;in order to see how they interact with the compounds.

The study concludes that monolingual dictionaries provide more information about how compounds are listed in the selected dictionaries.

As for the translation test, the results show that there is a lack of knowledge on the subjects part in how to recognize a compound in context and how to check it up in dictionaries.