Making foreign language texts comprehensible for beginners: An experiment with an electronic glossary

Abstract A group of beginning students of English as a foreign language was tested in a reading comprehension task, using either a computer-mediated electronic glossary or a traditional bilingual dictionary. The findings indicate that the electronic glossary was more efficient than the traditional dictionary, allowing the subjects to understand 38% more of the passage, using 50% less time. The basic concepts involved in the study (lexicon-grammars, hypertext and computer-mediated reading) are also defined and the electronic glossary used in the experiment is described in some detail. The role of the electronic glossary in a comprehension-based theory of language acquisition is finally discussed.