Advanced Level >> Miscellaneous >> Getting higher level students thinking about how they use dictionaries as learning aids.
Dictionary Use Questionnaire
Advanced
1. Do you have a monolingual dictionary? (English only)
2. If yes, how often do you use it?
Daily
4 to 5 times a week
2 or 3 times a week
once a week
sometimes
3. Do you ever look through a dictionary without looking for a particular word?
4. Is it important for you to know the translation of a word?
5. When you find the word you want, how often do you cross-reference with other words used in the definition?
6. How much of the phonetic alphabet do you know?
None
Some
All of it
7. How often do you check a dictionary only for the pronunciation?
8. When you find the meaning of an unknown word, what do you do?
Note it down
Hope to remember it
Put a mark in the dictionary
Write an example sentence
Something else:
9. Do you understand all the symbols and abbreviations used in your dictionary? What does "Intrans. V + prep." mean. Where in your dictionary is this information?
10. Would you look up a word to see how it's used grammatically?
11. Do you usually check unknown words from conversations you have had?
12. How long does it take you to find the word you are looking for? Longer than your class colleagues?
13. If you saw the expression "a house built on sand" and wanted to find out what it meant, where would you look in your dictionary?
14. What type of information do you look up most often?
Pronunciation
Grammatical Use
Idioms
Phrasal Verbs
Preposition Use
Spelling
Stress
Other:
For Us Teachers: Why are we asking these questions?
Here are a few pointers as to what we can discover with certain questions:
2. Do students use a dictionary as a general language helper?
3. What is the student's attitude towards vocabulary and language learning in general?
5. How well do students know their dictionary. How important is full understanding to them?
6. Are they equipped to make full use of the information provided in a dictionary? Can we help them?
8. What language learner strategies are used by the student?
9. As number five.
11. Do students hold words in mind to check later - another sign of learner independence and good learner strategies.
12. How efficient are students at finding their way around the dictionary?
13. Similar to number eleven, seeing how efficient students use dictionaries.
