| Abstract |
This paper reports on the results of a research study which compared the effectiveness of different monolingual dictionaries for language comprehension and production by advanced Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong. A group of 31 students majoring in English participated in the study. This included a meaning determination task which required students to use a dictionary to determine the meanings of nine familiar words used in unfamiliar contexts, a sentence completion task which required students to use a dictionary to complete ten English sentences based on some given Chinese contexts, as well as a sentence construction task which required students to use a dictionary to construct ten English sentences using some given English prompts. Different monolingual dictionaries were used in the tasks by different sub-groups of participants, namely Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary 6th edition (COBUILD6)/ Collins COBUILD Learner’s Dictionary Concise Edition (COBUILD Concise), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5th edition (LDOCE5), and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 3rd edition (CALD3). The accuracy rates at which the participants performed the tasks were calculated, and their perception of the usefulness of the dictionaries was collected. It was found that monolingual dictionaries are effectiveness not just for language comprehension but also for language production, yet successful dictionary consultation does not depend on the dictionary being used. Learners’ dictionary skills and their abilities to extract relevant information from a dictionary are more important than the choice of dictionaries. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX12-050,
author = {Alice Yin Wa Chan},
title = {A Comparison Between COBUILD, LDOCE5 and CALD3: Efficacy and Effectiveness of the Dictionaries for Language Comprehension and Production},
pages = {606--612},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2012},
month = {aug},
date = {7-11},
address = {Oslo,Norway},
editor = {Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld and Julie Matilde Torjusen},
publisher = {Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo},
isbn = {978-82-303-2228-4},
} |
