The Electronic Bilingual Dictionary as a Reading Aid to EFL Learners: Research Findings and Implications

Abstract

The paper discusses the findings of a study on using recorded on-line data to investigate EFL learners’ strategies of word consultation in order to facilitate reading comprehension. The on-line logs were triangulated with off-line data which included the answers to reading comprehension and paraphrase questions, time on task, the selection of the word sense among its multiple definitions, and a questionnaire which surveys comparisons between the dictionary and other look-up facilities. It was found that learners with better language proficiency understood more, read faster, looked up fewer words and were able to disambiguate more polysemous words. Yet, advanced learners are found to ignore some unknown words without looking them up while using more global strategies. Qualitative analyses showed some effective reading and word consultation strategies. Suggestions are put forward to shed light on how to tap the power of dictionary use for reading comprehension.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.