When I was a teenager in China, English learning was an extremely tedious and painful experience. I clearly remember that for every English class I had to carry a heavy Oxford Chinese-to-English dictionary so that I could look up all the new words I encountered in readings. More importantly, as my English teacher suggested, we should have at least two more dictionaries other than the basic one, like English-to-English and Word Roots Dictionary. It was so frustrated when I tried to read a news article on Newsweek or New York Times because I might be stumbled by more than 50 words in one article and then spent two more hours to look them up in my thick and heavy paper dictionary. Even though the content of an article was very engaging for me, I would be discouraged by the broken reading experience and tedious words checking work, and eventually gave it up halfway. This tendency made my English learning very inefficient and my enthusiasm to English quite low.
Suddenly one day, almost all my classmates started to have electronic dictionaries (they were portable and looked like calculators), and soon after online dictionaries have been pervasive. Reading became much easier and enjoyable for me: while I was reading articles online, I could put my mouse to capture the words I didn’t know and read through it in just one sitting. Because of the convenience of electronic dictionary, both quality and quality of my reading have been greatly improved.
Not only for me, but also for millions of English learners in china, have e-dictionaries brought tremendous positive impacts on their English learning. First, because it is much lighter than a paper dictionary and is accessible in multiple devices like phone, laptop, and public computer, e-dictionary has been largely stimulating EFL students’ initiative to practice their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in anywhere and at anytime. Second, functions like “screen word capturing (like Youdao),” “picture taking of words (like Google Translator),” “voice translator” and “sound” can significantly accelerate learners’ mastery of the meaning and pronunciation of a word. In addition, electronic dictionaries have much more capacity than traditional ones and therefore contain more entries. For example, a single online dictionary could include entries from many different versions of print dictionaries, like Oxford, Cambridge, Longman and Merriam-Webster, so that students could learn a word by making comparison and contrast among various sources. Also, online dictionary can be updated quickly to catch up with all kinds of changes and usages of words in real world. For example, Urban Dictionary contains over seven million definitions of slangs and phrases at the beginning of 2014, and there are about 2,000 new entries being added on a daily basis. Generally speaking, with e-dictionary, English learning has become much easier and interesting for EFL learners, and both the effectiveness and enjoyment have been largely increased.
Admittedly, there are also disadvantages of using electronic dictionaries. For example, unlike paper dictionary, which provides information clusters including linguistic and phonetic features as well as synonyms, antonyms and different usages of a word, electronic dictionary usually just shows isolated meanings of a word on separated lines. More importantly, using traditional dictionary, foreign language learners have to search a word by alphabet order, which is an excellent brain excise that can help learners to practice and memorize the spelling of a word, whereas using an e-dictionary, learners just need to passively enter a word in the search box or just take a picture of it, this is not beneficial for vocabulary retention. In addition, there will be pop-ups and advertisements disrupting users while they are learning.
Nonetheless, as an English learner for more than 20 years, I believe that with the rapid technological progress, the function of electronic and online dictionaries will become more powerful and user-friendly, and the drawbacks will be overcome gradually. As a future language teacher, I would recommend my beginning level students use more paper dictionary to become familiar with the alphabet and orthographic rules, while for intermediate or high proficiency students, I would recommend them to use e-dictionary as a main tool to develop their extensive reading and listening skills, whereas use print as a supplementary means to improve their intensive reading and writing, so that both the efficiency and accuracy of their language learning will be prominently increased.
References
Dziemianko, A. ( 2010). Paper or Electronic? The Role of Dictionary Form in Language Reception, Production and the Retention of Meaning and Collocations. International Journal of Lexicography 23(3), 257-273.
Hamdi, C. (2015). The Effects of Electronic Dictionary Use on Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Retention of EFL Students. Arab World English Journal, 180-191.
Tabata-Sandom, M. M. (2016). How do Learners of Japanese Read Texts When They Use Online Pop-up Dictionaries?. Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 16(2), 98-109.
Hello Yunjie!
Great thoughts on the e-dictionary. I waste so much time in my Italian classroom answering “what does _____ mean?” questions and these such devices and apps have made life so much easier. The only thing to worry about with e-dictionaries is the possibly of cheating in the foreign language classroom. When we give students too many ideas about certain translators, they take it too far. Just last week I gave a student a zero on an assignment because his short half of a page writing contained six instances of “passato remoto,” the remote past tense only found in old Italian writings. This is a verb tense I would NEVER go over in the high school classroom setting, especially for his level 2 Italian class. He had used Google translate which often mistakes the differences in the past for Italian. So we always have to be careful!
Oops, my name isn’t coming up – Emily Jacobsen!