Individual differences in dictionary strategy use

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.