Coverage of spoken English in relation to learners' dictionaries, especially the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

When conceptualizing new dictionaries for learners of English, we begin with the assumption that learners want to know and learn about natural spoken language. We assume that they want to understand spoken English in order to converse with their own age group if they visit the UK or the US; that they want to communicate with other non-native speakers of English using English as a modern lingua franca as they travel round the world; or that they want to be able to use spoken English in their adult life, whether by giving a paper at a conference in English or by taking part in business meetings or telephone calls. The teacher's perspective may be somewhat different. Teachers may have doubts about the value of including spoken language in a dictionary. They may think - with some justification - that spoken language is disjointed, less precise, and above all grammatically imperfect when compared with written English. The bulk of the exams that are taken by students of English in countries around the world still concentrate on written English. The advantages of the written form of English in terms of its permanence and the availability of students' scripts for marking at a later point or a different place are obvious. On the other hand, there is an increasing trend for papers on spoken English to be included as part of the examinations in most countries. The language presented in many English textbooks as normal English conversation is not really very natural or typical of ordinary spoken communication. Unusual grammatical patterns may be included, and often repeated to make a point in a way that tends not to happen in speech. We at Longman Dictionaries have been sensitized through working for several years with corpuses of naturally occurring spoken language, and it therefore seems very apparent to us when conversations are "made up". We understand that this is done to teach a language point in what is supposed to be a lively and natural context, but this often does not ring true. This is probably because the starting point for writers of such textbooks is usually a syllabus. In the case of dictionaries, there is no syllabus; it is the language itself that is being presented. Yet even with dictionaries that claim to be corpus-based, we often find the same type of forced, unconvincing language as in textbooks. This is most apparent in example sentences.