Abstract
Abstract This article presents the results of an empirical study which examined Thai EFL learners’ use of paper bilingual dictionaries to select synonyms for summary writing and paraphrasing. Seventy-one summary pieces were analysed for the appropriate substitutions of synonyms. The analyses revealed that the bilingual dictionaries consulted by the students contributed to many erroneous choices of synonyms, partly due to the ambiguous treatment of synonymy and also inadequate lexical information. Linking adverbials were the only category where there were more accurate than inaccurate substitutions for synonyms, but the opposite was true of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. The incorrect uses of synonyms were in terms of lexical sense, register, syntax, and collocation. These results suggest that a bilingual dictionary should not treat multiple synonyms offered for a polysemous word as having a single sense, but they should instead be allocated to their specific senses and supplemented with sufficient co-textual and contextual information.
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