Language teachers repeatedly get perplexed about the role of dictionaries in English teaching and learning. The reason may be that dictionaries are viewed either as a tool to enhance students’ tendency to learn individual words when acquiring a second language (Summers, 1988) or an obstacle to hinder reading fluency and vocabulary learning. The debate of whether dictionaries should be used in the foreign language classroom, and what dictionaries, if at all, should be used has always been a lively one amongst language teachers and lexicographers. Amongst all the questions that can be asked of dictionaries, one has
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received the most attention: Which is better, using a dictionary or simply guessing from context? Or to put it another way: Do dictionaries make a difference?
1.2.1 The Pros of Dictionary Use
Researches showed that dictionary use can benefit language learners in their vocabulary learning, writing, and reading comprehension. The positive effects of dictionary use will be discussed in detailed in the following chapter.
1.2.2 The Cons of Dictionary Use
Many language teachers have often regarded dictionary use negatively, taking the view that it encourages laziness (the learner should make the effort to guess unknown words) or that it distracts students’ attention from the teacher or, bilingual dictionaries would lead to unwanted 'thinking in the first language'. Because of their negative views towards dictionary use, they seldom have students use dictionaries. Consequently students' dictionary skills are often poor.
As far as reading fluency is concerned, students’ excessive consultation with dictionaries may interrupt the flow of their concentration on information and make reading a process of word-by-word decoding, in which the whole meaning is often missed (Summers, 1988;
Scholfield, 1982). Teachers’ worries over vocabulary learning may be resulted from students’ using bilingual dictionaries too blindly, or from students expecting a one-to-one correlation between their own language and English. As Hosenfeld (1977) observed, looking up words might interrupt the fluency of the reading.
1.2.3 Moderate Use of Dictionary Use
Hosenfeld mentioned: “It is not that successful readers never look up words… but only after efficient strategies have failed” (p.121). Nation and Coady also included looking up
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words in a dictionary as the last means of checking a guess, and the guess was only made if the use of the wider context did not provide the meaning (1988, p. 107). Researcher such as Jones (1995) contended that dictionary use is an effective strategy for learners of English.
Such a claim does not mean that dictionaries are the sole or the best source of linguistic knowledge, but that dictionaries are one of the skills that learners make use of to figure out the meaning of words (e.g., deducing the meanings of the unknown words from the clues in a text). In the reading process, dictionary use competes with various kinds of guessing, or just ignoring unknown words that come up. There is strong evidence that expert readers make good choices about when to use each of these. They do not use the dictionary exclusively, and often do so after making attempts at guessing. They often use more than one dictionary, and they progress from reliance on bilingual to monolingual target language dictionaries.
Before any agreements on the use of dictionaries have been reached, it is interesting to notice that, with the appearance of electronic dictionaries, a couple of the above-mentioned problems with conventional dictionaries (e.g. the time spent) appear to have been rectified.
A number of contemporary electronic dictionaries contain both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and allow readers to look up words more quickly, thereby contributing to much shorter distractions from their concentration on reading. Therefore, it is still meaningful to emphasize moderate dictionary use among junior high EFL students, considering the benefits dictionaries can bring (e.g. vocabulary learning, reading, and writing).
1.2.4 The Difficulty of Dictionary Use
As far as successful dictionary look-up is concerned, adept dictionary skills and inferring ability are necessary for learners to avoid misinterpreting word meanings.
Generally speaking, dictionary skills are the skills to save users’ time and improve their English. It includes having the skills on how to use dictionaries faster and how to improve users’ vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and writing by correct use of their dictionaries,
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comprising skills of macrostructure lookups and microstructure lookups. If examined more closely, various essential sub skills have been recognized in dictionary lookups, such as quick alphabetical order search, readiness to check in more than one place for an apparently absent word, ability to scan and select from a polysemous entry (Nesi 1999). Dictionary use, where adept skills are required, is not as easy as what we thought. Scholfield (1982) mentioned that if we think that learners open the dictionary and are provided with words to fit the context, we are mistaken because it is not so simple.
Nesi and Haill (2002) conducted a study by requiring 89 international students at a British university to report on the way they had consulted dictionaries in texts of their choice over a period of three years. Their data showed that whilst the majority of words were looked up successfully, more than half of the subjects were unsuccessful in at least one out of five dictionary consultations.
Dictionaries are widely used, but dictionary use is not an easy task (Hartmann, 1999;
Nation, 1990; Scholfield, 1982; Wright, 1998). As Hartmann (1999, p. 5) noticed,
“Throughout and beyond the English-speaking world, dictionaries (especially EFL learners’
dictionaries) are ‘big business’, but the skills required of their users are still underdeveloped.”
As McKeown (1993) highlighted in her study, the successful learning of a word by means of dictionary consultation required the lexical sophistication on the part of students.
That is, the learners need to process a wide range of semantic categories and crosscheck the definitions of the unfamiliar words to ensure that translations match the meaning required by the context.
Similarly, Wright (1998) pointed out that “dictionaries are among the most readily available, widely used, and cheapest learning resources in the classroom. They are also among the most difficult to use. We teachers often overlook the fact that we need a whole different set of reading skills to be efficient dictionary-users. ” (p.5) The successful dictionary use entails students’ inferring ability and dictionary reference skills. Dictionary
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use skills are not what students will master by themselves. Because of the importance and the difficulty of dictionary use, Wright (1998) suggested explicit dictionary instruction be given in English class. She believed that students benefit enormously from having the confidence and ability to use dictionaries properly.