The Dictionary as a Secondary Source in Language Learning.

VERY FEW TEACHERS have never laughed or groaned at student compositions that contain errors such as the one above. Even though we know exactly what the source is-improper use of a dictionary-we nevertheless permit such errors to recur year after year. The problems are polysemy, or a word having more than one meaning, and homonyms, which are different words that are pronounced or spelled alike. When students look up an English word in a bilingual dictionary, they find most or all of its meanings represented by French equivalents. Since many dictionaries do not give the semantic field of each translation (Al-Kasimi 67; Ianucci), the student decides to guess. Even when the dictionary does add fields, students do not understand or do not pay attention and end up choosing the wrong word. Thus, the student quoted above who looked up quack may have found charlatan; coin-coin and not realized that the semi-colon separated the semantic fields of dubious professions and animal noises. We must ask ourselves whether students have the right abilities to accomplish the tasks we demand of them. In the first few weeks of instruction, we sometimes ask for totally original compositions for which we provide no structure. A survey of foreign language teaching literature of the last twenty years shows relatively little information on dictionary use.1 One could therefore question whether foreign language teachers consider dictionary use a skill worth teaching. The purpose of this article is to examine this question and to determine what teachers can do to improve the situation.