Adverb use in EFL student writing: from learner dictionary to text production

Adverbs are a somewhat neglected linguistic category; adverbs functioning as submodifiers even more so. Yet they play a central role in the conventional collocations that advanced learners are expected to produce in argumentative writing: deeply troubling; widely-known; strongly-held beliefs. Adverbs of degree have been identified as being problematic for Italian learners of English, in that very and really are over-used, while their corresponding lexical adverbs (such as highly, closely and deeply) are virtually unused (Philip 2007). While the EFL curriculum contributes to the problem, dictionaries too are at fault. This contribution focuses on lexical adverbs of degree, most of which are metaphorically motivated, examining their treatment in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. It suggests improvements to layout and content which would enable students to adopt alternatives to the over-used forms very, really and a lot