7.1.3 Question Three
For what purposes do students use electronic and online dictionaries?
The researcher looked at the types of language skills that urge students to use the dictionary and found that they
use the dictionary mostly for the purpose of reading comprehension and least for the purpose of translation. A
hundred ten students indicated that they use the electronic dictionary for the purpose of reading (74%), 92 for
listening (62%), 74 for writing (50%), 30 (20%) for speaking and 16 (11%) for translation. Some of these
students used the dictionary for two or three skills at once, hence the discrepancy between the above numbers
and the total number of the population. Table three below shows a summary of the above information. These
percentages show that the receptive skills of reading and listening motivated the majority of students to use the
dictionary (62-74%). This result is natural taking into account the fact that at this stage of their college life,
students are exposed to extensive amounts of authentic texts that contain unfamiliar vocabulary items of a less
frequent nature. As for the productive skills, writing seemed to urge students to use the dictionary more than
speaking; 50% versus 20% for writing and speaking respectively. Students probably used the dictionaries
especially the electronic ones to translate certain words or expressions or to check word spelling. These results
also show that only a minority of students (20%) use the dictionary in the context of speaking. This is rather
strange taking into account that these students suffer from pronunciation problems and that both electronic and
online dictionaries could be a great aid in this respect. This may be compared to the results of the study by Dziemianko (2010) in the Polish context which showed that students using electronic dictionaries have achieved
better vocabulary retention than those using print or paper ones. Her conclusion by contrast applied to both
receptive and productive skills.