Electronic Dictionaries in ESL classrooms

The present study tried to find out the percentage of ESL and translation students who use the electronic dictionary (ED), differences between ESL and translation students in using ED, level at which students started to use an ED, courses in which students use an ED, kinds of ED that students use, i.e. monolingual, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, general or specialized ED, the percentage of words that they find in an ED, kinds of linguistic information that they obtain from an ED, reasons for using an ED, limitations of an ED as perceived by the students in both groups, reasons for not using an ED at all, and the advantages of the book dictionary (BD) over an ED as perceived by users of an ED.

Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf