An Investigation Into Dictionary Use Among Non-English Majors

Dictionary use is one of the most common practices among language learners. However, most college EFL learners are not efficient dictionary users. Complaints are often heard about the confusion and frustration brought about by dictionary consultation. Many students are not sure of what kind of dictionaries are appropriate to their proficiency levels and purposes, what functions of the dictionaries could specially benefit their learning, when and how they should look up a word in a dictionary, which definition gives the accurate meaning in the context of the tasks being performed. Besides, many ignore the collocations, stylistic and syntactic features of an entry word, which lead to their attention being focused only on the first explanation of a headword, thus misinterpretations of a reading assignment often occurs and many vocabulary mistakes appear in their language output tasks. The problems may result from the fact that dictionary consultation for most of the students and on most occasions occurs spontaneously after class and without the teacher's guidance. As the class time of college English course is usually very limited and some teachers may neglect the importance of dictionary use in EFL teaching, few teachers' give advice on dictionary use in their classroom instruction. However, teachers usually take it for granted that students should solve at least some of their vocabulary problems after class with the help of a dictionary. As a result, students often use dictionaries independently after class and individual students show much variation in their consultation attitudes, beliefs, looking-up strategies and habits in their college EFL learning process.College English teaching and learning is aimed at building the learner's linguistic knowledge, cultivating their language skills, developing their learning strategies and fostering their cross-cultural communication competence. Dictionary strategies are among the most important learning strategies for language learners. Although they belong to the cognitive strategies according to O'Malley and Chamot (1990), the process of dictionary consultation involves far more than only cognitive strategies as it is also closely related to many individual factors such as motivation, planning, self-assessment and self-regulation, and all these play an important role in fostering self-directed, independent dictionary consultation, thus promote learners' learning autonomy in language acquisition.The present study aims to examine situations of dictionary use in college English learning process from the following aspects: types of dictionaries used and frequency of dictionaries use; purposes of consultation and factors affecting their dictionary choice; what learning tasks usually involve the students in dictionary use; what consultation strategies are employed; the major difference in dictionary use between successful language learners and unsuccessful language learners. A questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate 132 university students, 82 sophomores and 50 freshman. Later an interview was carried out to obtain information from 5 successful learners and 5 unsuccessful learners in order to find the difference between successful learners and unsuccessful learners in their attitude, habits and strategies of dictionary consultation. The judgment of their language learning result was based on a simulated College English Test Band-4 test, which was administered among sophomores to collect data of the subjects' language proficiency level. Descriptive statistics were used to show the general picture of students' dictionary use, and a correlation analysis was performed to find out the relationships between dictionary use and subjects' language proficiency level.The study replicated some previous findings and also added some new points to dictionary use study, which has some implications for college English teaching. In correspondence with the author's expectation, dictionary or glossary usage are very common practices among freshmen and sophomores, with the percentage of dictionary ownership rising slightly as the students started their second year study in college. However, most students cannot afford to take full advantage of dictionaries and related books. For example, they mostly choose dictionaries or glossary books with only English-Chinese definitions or explanations, most of them only pay attention to the definition or meaning of a word while neglecting the pragmatic aspect of a word, collocations as well as word forming knowledge. Besides, electronic dictionaries are used more frequently than paper dictionaries owing to their convenience and multi-functions, and online dictionaries have also begun to gain their popularity among college students. However, neither electronic dictionaries nor online dictionaries can supply sufficient grammatical, pragmatic, rhetorical and word-forming information, thus lots of students undergo the impact of negative transfer of their mother tongue and make many vocabulary mistakes in their language output tasks.Furthermore, successful students use dictionaries more actively in output-oriented learning activities such as brainstorming, writing and wiring revision than unsuccessful learners, as they show higher percentage of ownership of monolingual dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries, and they consult them more frequently in output-oriented activities. Unsuccessful learners consult dictionaries mainly in reading activities and never go further than finding the first definition or meaning of an entry, which sometimes does not agree with the context of the reading task. Successful language learners show more autonomy in solving English learning problems through dictionary consultation and make every effort to seek useful information on how to use a dictionary successfully. They read the preface, the grammar codes, the general introduction of a dictionary functions more often than unsuccessful learners and employ more dictionary strategies, which indicates their better lexicographical cognitive ability.