An Exploration of Online Bilingual Dictionary Use by Chinese University Students Studying in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Chinese students make up the largest group of international students around the world, yet university tutorsoutside China are largely unaware of the affordances of their preferred electronic dictionaries (EDs), whichare mostly non-expert produced ones that Nesi (2012) named ‘alternative electronic dictionaries (AEDs)’. Although AEDs in China are technically advanced and, in the case of Youdao, frequently updated, research todate has failed to investigate some of their rather obvious flaws and how EFL learners actually make use ofand make sense of the entries. The overwhelming majority of studies to date have chosen instead to examineaspects such as learners’ (in)ability to memorise lexical items while using expert-produced EDs (see e.g. Zhang & Wu 2019) or focus narrowly on lexical information available in the entries while ignoring whetherthis information is accurate (see e.g. Liu et al. 2020). In other words, the body of literature primarily focuseson evaluating the outcomes of dictionary consultation and the ‘usability’ (users’ willingness to use adictionary and their satisfaction from using it as defined by Laufer and Kimmel 1997: 362) of EDs. This thesisdescribes a study which probes the under-researched areas: the ‘usefulness’ (i.e. the extent to which adictionary can provide helpful information to users as defined by Laufer and Kimmel 1997: 362) of theselected ED, Youdao Dictionary, and the process of dictionary consultation of Chinese EFL learners. Twentyuniversity-level Chinese students studying at UK universities participated in the current study. The main studywas an observation consisting of two tasks: reading an English text and producing a summary in Chinese, andvice versa. I observed their L2>L1 and L1>L2 lookup strategies to identify whether and how they usedYoudao entries help them complete the tasks. The data collection was conducted through various digitalmeans, some of which have never been employed in dictionary use research before. The study has identifiedvarious usage behaviours typical to native-Chinese speaking dictionary users, including how their L1influences their decision-making before, during and after consultations. The findings of this study offer newknowledge related to Chinese EFL learners’ bilingual dictionary use, inform further research and teachingstrategies in the EFL/EAP areas and enrich methodological insights

Date of Award	Feb 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Hilary Nesi (Supervisor) & Benet Vincent (Supervisor)