THE SKETCH OF A COMPARATIVE DICTIONARY DEVELOPED FOR ESL LEARNERS AT ELEMENTARY LEVEL

Abstract

This study was intended to develop a dictionary for the students of English at elementary level who had different mother tongues. The purpose of developing a comparative dictionary was to pinpoint the problems of students in learning English. The study adopted qualitative research design to gather and analyse the data. The corpus analysis technique was employed to determine the selected lexis for the students of elementary grade. The students included in this research spoke different mother tongues i.e. Punjabi, Saraiki, and Urdu. As it has been observed that, there was no comparative dictionary in regional languages available while Punjabi and Saraiki are the most spoken languages in Punjab. Different types of dictionaries are available but a comparative dictionary is not available. A words list was made with the textbook. The words were arranged according to alphabetic order. The data was collected from the "English" textbook of "Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board, Lahore" of level eight. The sketch of the dictionary was developed according to data which was collected. Through this dictionary, various problems had been highlighted in this research.