Advanced Cantonese ESL Learners' Use of a Monolingual Dictionary for Language Production

Alice Y.W Chan

doi:10.5788/22-1-1000

Abstract

This article reports on the results of a research study which investigated the use of monolingual dictionaries by Hong Kong advanced Cantonese ESL learners in the production of target language sentences. Thirty-one English majors participated in a sentence completion task and a sentence construction task with and without the help of a monolingual dictionary. In the sentence completion task, a full Chinese context and a partial English context were given, whereas in the sentence construction task, only a few English prompts were given. Different self-reporting protocols, including introspective questionnaires, retrospective questionnaires and think-aloud recordings, and a post-task focus-group interview were conducted to tap into the participants' thinking processes during dictionary consultation. The results show that a monolingual dictionary is useful in helping learners produce target language sentences, yet learners encounter different kinds of consultation problems, some of which are related to their general use of dictionaries and others to the language in which their thinking processes are engaged. It is suggested that ESL learners use both monolingual and bilingualized dictionaries in their learning and that ESL teachers design dictionary skills training programs which take into account learners' linguistic competence and actual consultation problems.

Highlights

The use of a dictionary is regarded as "an indispensable component of home and academic life" (Abecassis 2007: 249)
The objectives of the present study were to (i) explore how advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in Hong Kong used a monolingual dictionary for target language production, (ii) examine the usefulness of a monolingual dictionary for target language production, and (iii) investigate the general problems learners encountered in dictionary consultation as well as those they encountered when different amounts and nature of contexts were given
A sentence was deemed accurately completed when the target word was used with the appropriate grammatical associations and the resultant meaning of the sentence was consistent with the Chinese context

Summary

Introduction

The use of a dictionary is regarded as "an indispensable component of home and academic life" (Abecassis 2007: 249). Dictionaries contain much useful encoding and decoding information, many learners as a foreign language (FL) or second language (SL) cannot make full use of them in their learning and ignore or misread a lot of useful information (Nesi and Meara 1994). They do not possess the dictionary skills needed, and many of them have not received formal dictionary skills training before (Chan 2005). Language learners encounter various difficulties in their use of dictionaries. Among the common ones are their inability to locate the relevant information needed and their difficulties in identifying, for example, the transitivity of a target verb or the countability of a target noun (Chan 2012b)

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion