Abstract
In the past 25 years there has been a flurry of interest in the complex nature of dictionary use, and researchers have devised taxonomies of strategies which aim to describe the process of looking up a word according to different purposes. Most research has focused on identifying and isolating specific strategies across large groups of users, with a view to validating existing taxonomies of dictionary use strategies. By contrast, there appears to be a paucity of research investigating the complexity and the interconnectedness of factors that have a bearing on the individual user’s strategic behaviour in dictionary use, which, we would like to argue, is only possible through an in-depth qualitative case study approach. This article reports on an exploratory case study which has involved three first-year Modern Languages students at three different levels of competence (ranging from B1 to B2). The three participants were asked to carry out four tasks for receptive and productive use of a monolingual dictionary (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 2003). In order to tap the participants’ thought processes, we asked them to engage in concurrent verbalization. The experiment was video and audio recorded and the students’ verbalizations were subsequently transcribed. Data analysis has shown how individual strategy use is correlated with each participant’s English language proficiency and their degree of language awareness.
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Dörnyei (2007: 147) points out that the main difference between these two types of introspection lies in the timing: the retrospective interview or report happens after the task has been completed, whereas the think-aloud technique is applied real-time, concurrently to the examined task/process.
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Leow and Morgan-Short (2004: 37) address the issue of ‘reactivity’—“the act of thinking aloud may trigger changes in learners’ cognitive processes while performing the task” and conclude that the potential impact of reactivity in studies that employ concurrent verbalization procedures remains to be empirically tested in the Second Language Acquistion field.
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For example, Bishop (2000) carried out research with students of the Open University with the aim of devising guidelines for using bilingual dictionaries; Winkler (2001) investigated how EFL learners use a learners’ dictionary in book form and on CD-ROM; Nesi and Haill (2002) reported on an investigation into the dictionary-using habits of students at a British university over a period of three years; Wingate (2004) studied three groups of students using monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.
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With reference to the findings from studies within developmental psychology, Macaro (2006: 327) concludes that “for a strategy to be effective in promoting learning or improved performance, it must be combined with other strategies either simultaneously or in sequence, thus forming strategy clusters”.
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Cf. Dörnyei (2005: 171) for a review of research in the area of learner variation in strategy use. Macaro (2006: 320–321) states that a body of evidence coming from learner strategy research has led scholars to make claims such as: (a) strategy use seems to correlate with different aspects of language learning success and motivation; (b) there are group and individual differences in learner strategy use; (c) learner strategy training can be effective if it is carried out over an extended period of time and if it includes a focus on metacognition.
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When decoding–reading–one is dealing with the meaning of a lexical item. An encoding learner needs more information than a decoding learner and the information is of a different nature. When encoding learners look up a word whose meaning they already know to some extent. They may want to confirm this meaning, but their main interest is usage, a combination of syntax and collocation (Humblé 2001: 63–66). Nation (2001: 283–288) suggests making a similar distinction in his dictionary skill taxonomy according to whether the dictionary is used for receptive use (with listening and reading) or for productive use (with speaking and writing).
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This strategy was originally described in a study carried out with 10–11-year old children by Miller and Gildea (1987) in order to discover the kinds of mistakes native speakers of English attending schools in the United States make when looking up words. A detailed description of this study can be found in Nesi (2000: 42–46).
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Pedrazzini, L., Nava, A. (2012). Individual Differences in Dictionary Strategy Use. In: Pawlak, M. (eds) New Perspectives on Individual Differences in Language Learning and Teaching. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20850-8_20
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