Children's dictionaries as a form of edutainment? User-orientation, engagement and proximity for learning

This paper addresses the construction of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings (Halliday 1985) in children’s dictionaries that are primarily a form of edutainment (Buckingham and Scanlon 2002). Working against the background of research into multimodal lexicography (Lew 2010; Chan 2011; Liu 2015, 2017) in the electronic dictionary age (De Schryver 2003; Tarp 2008; Granger 2012), I shall concentrate on the interplay of content, form and composition space in the Oxford Children’s Dictionary (2015) and the Oxford Children’s Illustrated Dictionary (2018) vis-à-vis other paper dictionaries within the family. As will be seen, joint compositions of intentionally co-present text and images interact in diverse ways and to different extents in the interest of user-orientation on the content level, guidance, and user-engagement and proximity on the textual and interpersonal levels.