An Investigation And Analysis Of English Dictionary Use Among High School Students

The study on dictionary use dated from the late 1970s. As a learning strategy, dictionary use belongs to cognitive learning strategy, playing an important role in learners'learning process. There are plenty of researches on learners'dictionary use in China, but most of them focus on the college students, ignoring the high school students. English dictionary is the most commonly used reference book in the process of learner's English learning. But the situation high school students use dictionary to assist their learning is not satisfactory, as found in the high school English teaching. There are a lot of types of dictionary, with different features and focus, but high school students seem to know little about it. Most students do not turn to different dictionaries by their varied learning tasks and purposes. Meaning is the most frequently consulted information in a dictionary. However, they show ignorance to the other kinds of information available, such as grammatical information, or stylistic collocation. Using a dictionary demands the consulter's strategies and skills, which is supported by a lot of scholars'researches and studies. High school students show a lack of dictionary use strategy and unskillful use of strategies. There are reasons mainly in two aspects resulting to the situation. On one hand, high school students neglect the importance of dictionary and dictionary use strategy. On the other hand, high school English teachers do not pay attention to the special dictionary use training and instruction. Besides the learning and teaching tasks for both students and teachers are arduous, making them too concerned about and focused on the achievement. The theoretical and practical fruits of dictionary use among high school students are few, adding another reason for students'and teachers'ignorance of dictionary in high school English pedagogy. Dictionary is a tool for students to solve problems in their learning process, especially in their autonomous learning. Different learning styles and language proficiency may have an influence on students'dictionary use, making students show different consultation habit and efficiency.This thesis is going to investigate the present situation high school students use dictionary in their learning process in five aspects:the ownership and utilization of different types of dictionary; the dictionary consultation in varied learning tasks; dictionary consultation strategy; purpose of consultation; special dictionary use training.In this study, a questionnaire was conducted among 360 high school students of six classes in three different grades. As classes in Grade 2 and Grade 3 in high school are divided into humanity focused classes and science focused classes, the two classes in each grade involved both kinds of class, to avoid the possible influence.To have a further study, an interview was conducted to help find the difference in dictionary between the successful English learners and the unsuccessful English learners. 12 subjects who did the questionnaire were involved in this interview,6 being successful and the other 6 being unsuccessful judged by their score in the final examination they sat a month ago and the assessment form their English teachers.After the questionnaire and interview, a descriptive data analysis was conducted to have a general picture of the dictionary use among high school students. What is more, a correlation analysis was made on the relationship between the dictionary type and their English language proficiency, and between the consultation strategy and their English language proficiency.In the process of data analysis, the author made some findings on the dictionary use among high school students. It was found that most of the high school students own dictionary. Students in upper grade have a higher percentage of dictionary ownership. However, on the whole students in high school do not use dictionary effectively and efficiently. Many students use only English-Chinese dictionary or Chinese-English dictionary, tending to ignore the monolingual and bilingualized dictionary. Even though some of them consult a bilingualized dictionary sometimes, they prefer to ignore the English explanation and jump to the Chinese translation. The study also found that high school students show a lack of knowledge of diverse information in a dictionary and dictionary's function. The information consulted most frequently by high school students is meaning, next is spelling. They seldom consult a dictionary for grammatical, stylistic and cultural information. Electronic dictionary is not widely used according to the finding in this thesis. In receptive language learning tasks, like reading comprehension, students consult dictionary more than they do in productive language learning tasks, like writing. The comparison of the dictionary use between successful and unsuccessful learners is mainly based on the interview. They show varied characteristic in aspects like choosing dictionary, finding an entry, and their consultation habits. Successful learners are found to be more flexible and independent in dictionary use. And they prefer to read the explanation of a word in both English and Chinese, to get more precise information.At the end of the study, the author gave some suggestions to the high school English pedagogy based on the findings.