STUDIES ON BILINGUALIZED DICTIONARIES: THE USER PERSPECTIVE

Bilingualized dictionaries (BLDs) are very popular with Chinese-speaking EFL learners, yet they have received relatively little attention from researchers of user studies. This article reports on two studies of the use of English-Chinese BLDs by Chinese tertiary-level students. Laufer and Hadar's study (1997) was replicated to compare the effectiveness of three dictionaries: a BLD, i.e. Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (OALECD6), a monolingual dictionary, i.e. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE3) and a bilingual dictionary, i.e. A New English-Chinese Dictionary (NECD century edition). It was found that OALECD6 is significantly better than LDOCE3 and NECD in terms of its overall effects on the comprehension and production of unfamiliar words. With regard to vocabulary retention, OALECD6 also yields the best results and is substantially more effective than LDOCE3 on the immediate retention test. The other study, a replication of Laufer and Kimmel's (1997), aims to investigate the language-oriented look-up patterns for BLD use. It was revealed that Chinese students are inclined to read both the L1 and L2 parts available in BLD entries rather than only one part of them. Students with higher levels of vocabulary proficiency tend to utilize the BLD features more fully.