Bilingualised or monolingual dictionaries? Preferences and practices of advanced ESL learners in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article reports on the results of a questionnaire and interview survey on Cantonese ESL learners' preference for bilingualised dictionaries or monolingual dictionaries. The questionnaire survey was implemented with about 160 university English majors in Hong Kong and three focus group interviews were conducted with 14 of these participants. The results of the study showed that learners' own perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of the two types of dictionaries were largely in line with previous research findings, but some learners had mistaken beliefs about bilingualised dictionaries, especially about the alleged lack of definitions and usage information. Misconceptions such as these could be dispelled by ESL teachers who, by designing programmes which incorporate the use of bilingualised dictionaries, alert their learners to the bank of information such dictionaries can provide. Editors of bilingualised dictionaries could also adopt more eye-catching special features or highlighting techniques to attract users' attention to the usage information included. When encountering difficulties, learners should be encouraged to use both types of dictionaries.

Keywords:

• bilingualism
• dictionary preference
• use of dictionaries

Acknowledgements

The work described in this article was fully supported by City University of Hong Kong (CityU Strategic Research Grant Number: 7008005). The support of the university is acknowledged. I would also like to thank all the respondents of the survey for their participation and my research assistant for her administrative help.

Notes

A bilingual dictionary relates the vocabularies of two languages (e.g. English and Chinese) together simply by means of translation equivalents (Hartmann & James, 1998). A bilingualised dictionary (e.g. OALECD) is a dictionary whose entries have been translated in full or in part into another language (e.g. English). Definitions and examples in the source language (e.g. Chinese) are also included (see also Hartmann, 1994; James, 1994; Marello, 1998).

The letters, CR, H, etc. represent the initials of the interview participants.

The term ‘bilingual (dictionaries)’ used by the respondents in the interview transcripts refers to the dictionary type under investigation: bilingualised (dictionaries). Because the former term is far more commonly used in the territory than the latter, which is probably only used by lexicographers and/or researchers in the field, the respondents were not required to make such a distinction in the interviews. Although most of them spoke in Cantonese, terms such as these were often in English. For consistency and preciseness, ‘bilingual’ is used throughout the translations.

As the interviews were all conducted in Cantonese, the transcriptions given in this article are only the closest translations of the participants' responses into idiomatic English.

The Chinese characters in this example are transliterated using the Jyutping system (Tang et al., 2002). The number at the end of each Romanised Cantonese syllable is a tone mark indicating one of the six distinctive tones in Hong Kong Cantonese.

The word dude is indeed translated as ‘sui3 go1’ in OALECD7.