Investigation & Studies On English Dictionary Use Among Non-English Majors

In the area of second language acquisition, interest has arisen in identifying learners' language learning motivation, language-learning strategy, language-learning proficiency, and the relationship between the three. College English teaching and learning is aimed at building the learner's linguistic knowledge, cultivating their language skills, developing their learning strategies. Motivation is viewed as a key factor in L2 learning. Motivation of the students is one of the most important factors influencing their success or failure in language learning. It may as well have an impact on EFL learners'dictionary using strategies. Effective dictionary using strategies may help learners to produce a full range of dictionaries as study resources, thus assist language learning.Dictionary strategies are among the most important learning strategies for language learners. They belong to the cognitive strategies according to O'Malley and Chamot (1990),but 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.Dictionary use is one of the most common practices among language learners. However, most college EFL learners are not efficient dictionary users. 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 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.The present study aims to examine situations of dictionary use in college English learning process a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate 80 university students. 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 their College English Test Band-4 test scores 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 strategies and subjects'language proficiency level. Besides, in order to investigate how this particular domain of language learning strategy relate to language learning motivation in the domain of learning English as a foreign language (EFL), an instrument of motivation test battery (Gardner,1985) was administered to the subjects and related their motivation scores to certain dictionary using strategies they employed.The findings in this study showed that 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. Besides, electronic dictionaries are used more frequently than paper dictionaries owing to their convenience and mufti-functions, and online dictionaries have also begun to gain their popularity among college students.Furthermore, successful students use dictionaries more actively in output-oriented learning activities than unsuccessful learners. 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.The study also showed that the dictionary use strategies and language proficiency, dictionary use strategies and language learning motivation had great correlation.