| Abstract |
This is a longitudinal study, which started in 2004 and ended in 2005. There participated sixteen high-school pupils - same number of boys and girls, aged 13-15, of similar socioeconomic background, whose MT is Turkish but living in Thrace, Greece and attending Greek State Schools rather than minority Public Schools. The fact is that we expected to have more subjects but, unfortunately, we had to exclude a lot of pupils due to a number of reasons such as differences in the socioeconomic level of the families, gender availability-having more male than female pupils, negative attitude towards the research, etc. What we are investigating is whether and to what extent the systematic use of both monolingual English dictionaries and bilingual Greek-English and English-Greek dictionaries could possibly result in a better reading comprehension and, in the long run, in an improvement and enrichment of their English vocabulary and, to a lesser extent, in Greek. Our aim is to reinforce their general linguistic competence and performance but also their strategic competence by encouraging them to use dictionaries when working at home, too. Furthermore, we are measuring their confidence levels before and after using dictionaries, at certain intervals over the whole period of the experiment. All the participants were given individualised instruction on dictionary use in pair and group work at certain intervals over the whole period of the experiment, too. It is important to notice that we are not really evaluating certain dictionaries, it is rather unrealistic as their resources are rather poor; nevertheless, we are trying to exploit what we really have at our disposal, that specific time. The results justified our expectations as most the students that collaborated seem to be very comfortable with dictionary use and confident with the information they expect to find there. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX08-125,
author = {Penelope Kambaki-Vougioukli},
title = {Teaching the Systematic Dictionary Use as a Strategy for Accuracy and Confidence Building},
pages = {1251-1257},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2008},
month = {jul},
date = {15-19},
address = {Barcelona, Spain},
editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
} |
