Watcharee Paisart. An Investigation of Dictionary Use to Facilitate Reading Comprehension. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching). King Mongkut's University Technology Thonburi. Library. : King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 2004.
An Investigation of Dictionary Use to Facilitate Reading Comprehension
Abstract:
This research study was conducted to investigate the use of dictionaries to aid readingcomprehension. The focus of the study was to see the kind of dictionary the studentsprefer to use; the kind of information they look for, and how they use a dictionary inreading comprehension.The experiment was carried out with the first year students from the Faculty of Science,Mathematics Department, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi(KMUTT). The subjects were divided into two groups. The first group contained 45subjects and the second group consisted of 16 subjects who were selected from thesubjects in the first group. The subjects in the first group were used to study generalperception of dictionary use, whereas another group was used to study in deeper details.The subjects in the second group were again divided into three sub-groups to use,different kinds of dictionary: (1) bilingualised, (2) bilingual, and (3) monolingualdictionaries. They were asked to read two reading passages, to do some exercises, andto make a record of the dictionary used in a task record sheet.From the results of the study, most students preferred to use a bilingual dictionary. Forthe information the subjects looked up most, it was found that they looked for meaningmost, perhaps because they focused on reading comprehension. When they used adictionary while performing the reading task, they used the dictionary in the first roundof reading since they wanted to get the meaning of words to help them comprehend thetext and to make sure of vocabulary meanings before reading intensively. The findingsreveal that the students used the dictionary inappropriately. They used it too often. Theydid not consider key words or use context clues to guess word meanings. The possiblefactor might be the insufficiency of vocabulary knowledge. From this finding, thesuggestions, thus, focus on how to improve vocabulary knowledge, classroom teaching,and extensive reading. Moreover, since the findings reveal that the students relied onThai translation, the use of monolingual dictionaries is encouraged.
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