TEXT BOXES FOCUSING ON FORMAL RELATIONS BETWEEN WORDS IN BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES AND THEIR ROLE IN LEARNING FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (FLE)

Abstract

This article deals with explanatory notes on French paronyms and homonyms included in the text boxes of the Sprytny słownik francusko-polski, polsko-francuski (Smart French-Polish, Polish-French Dictionary), a small bilingual dictionary aimed at Polish-speaking users, published by Lingea in 2010 and reissued twice (2014, 2017). Our objective is to evaluate, from a didactic perspective, the relevance of the information contained in these notes, both in the context of formal (institutional) teaching and informal, autonomous learning of French as a Foreign Language (FLE).
The dictionary’s editors focused their attention on paronyms (43 notes compared to 5 devoted to homonyms), despite the fact that French is also rich in homonyms (see e.g. Gniadek 1979 : 32, Arrivé, Gadet, Galmiche 1986 : 314, Lehmann, Martin-Berthet 2003 : 73). Some notes reveal certain shortcomings, such as incomplete explanations which could distort the linguistic reality, the absence of helpful illustrative examples, a lack of coherence between the French vocabulary introduced in the note and the provided Polish equivalents (which do not appear in the Polish macrostructure), the selection of relatively rare, outdated, or specialized vocabulary that is not essential in a pocket dictionary, or vocabulary that does not present any challenges from a contrastive perspective.
However, in the majority of cases, the studied notes contain information that is both interesting and useful for learning French. All 48 text boxes are found in the French-Polish section of the dictionary, although at least some of this information could be valuable for productive language use. In our view, including text boxes in the Polish-French section would be a great help for encoding.