EESE 3/2004Language Learners and Their Use of Dictionaries: The Case of SloveniaAlenka Vrbinc/Marjeta Vrbinc (Ljubljana)
Abstract The article presents the results of the first research into dictionary use conducted in Slovenia on a sample of 50 students from the Faculty of Economics and 20 students from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The first part deals with test subjects and their level of knowledge and describes the questionnaire used in the study. The second part presents the results and compares the achievements of both groups of test subjects, while the final part deals with the causes of these differences and proposes steps that could be taken to increase student and teacher awareness concerning dictionary use and dictionary skills. 1. Introduction
Learners of any foreign language are faced with various problems when decoding as well as when encoding a text. They do not know the meaning of the words they encounter when reading a text; they cannot remember or are not familiar with the word they want to use when writing or speaking in the L2; they lack knowledge about how to use a certain word in L2 correctly; they may be in two minds about which preposition to choose; they may have difficulty in finding the word they have looked up in a dictionary, because they may not know whether it is a lexical item of its own or whether it is a constituent element of a fixed phrase (e.g. an idiom), a compound or a phrasal verb.
As many studies have proved, learners are more willing to use bilingual dictionaries, especially for decoding, whereas monolingual dictionaries are consulted later when they have developed a higher level of proficiency in L2 (Tomaszczyk 1979, Baxter 1980, Bensoussan, Sim and Weiss 1984, Atkins and Knowles 1990). It is true that bilingual dictionaries help learners to a certain degree by providing translational equivalents of the words or phrases they have looked up; on the other hand, they do not provide all the information necessary for a successful production in L2 (e.g. they lack information on complementation, more subtle distinctions between words that seem synonymous are not explained and are insufficiently distinguished; they lack grammatical information). Therefore, students should be encouraged to consult their monolingual learners' dictionaries more often and should be acquainted with the wealth of information they include.
Atkins (1998: 1) points out that dictionaries are a complex assembly of intervowen facts, a feature which makes them difficult to understand because these facts are often presented in semi-sentences; dictionaries contain many abbreviations and references to concepts and, consequently, some effort is needed on the part of users before they can use their dictionaries effectively.
Especially in the last two decades, a number of research projects have been conducted investigating users' reference skills and needs, as well as their habits in the field of dictionary use (Béjoint 1981, Hartmann 1989, Nuccorini 1992, Bogaards 1992, 1994, Nesi 1994, Atkins and Varantola 1998, Dolezal and McCreary 1999, Cowie 1999, Tono 2001). Consequently, monolingual learners' dictionaries have improved a great deal, an improvement which can be seen if we compare the last editions of, e.g., OALD or LDOCE to mention just the two British learners' dictionaries with the longest tradition. But has there also been improvement in user's capacity to make full use of these books?
In Slovenia, no study has ever been carried out concerning dictionary users and their use of dictionaries. In order to find out what kind of dictionaries our students possess, how often and how effectively they use them, what they usually look up in their dictionaries, what they would like to find in them but is not included, we conducted the investigation presented in this article. The survey included two groups of respondents of approximately the same age and background (they all studied English in primary and secondary school), but one group now studies economics - they can be regarded as general dictionary users - while the other group studies English - they are future professional users of dictionaries who will often have to consult them in their career as teachers or translators. Our investigation was partly based on the EURALEX- and AILA-sponsored research project (cf. Atkins and Varantola 1998: 21-81), since it is a general type of research which does not concentrate on one particular aspect of dictionary use. It seems appropriate to start with a general research objective, rather than to address a more specialized issue. We adopted the design of the questionnaire used in this project, but made several modifications to meet our needs. The sample sentences for different tasks were changed and sentences that are contrastively different in English and Slovene, thus posing problems to Slovene learners of English were included. Some tasks were excluded (e.g. a passage for translation from one's mother tongue into English, since the correction of translations involves subjective decisions on the part of the person doing the correcting), and some were newly included (e.g. testing the ability of dictionary users to read the IPA, testing the ability to recognize the grammatical properties of words, testing the ability to choose the appropriate meaning of a polysemous word).
2. Description of the study
Test Subjects: Research was carried out among second- and third-year students of the Faculty of Economics (referred to as FE in the article) and second-year students of the Faculty of Arts (referred to as FA in the article), Department of English, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in March and April 2003. The researchers distributed 142 questionnaires of which 70 were completed and returned (i.e. 49 %). Sixty-six respondents (i.e. 94 %) speak Slovene as their mother tongue and 4 (i.e. 6 %) speak Serbo-Croatian. Those whose mother tongue is Serbo-Croatian are bilingual because they have lived in Slovenia since they were born and have obtained all their schooling in Slovenia.
Test Design: The questionnaire consisted of two parts (cf. Atkins and Varantola 1998): a Dictionary User Profile Form and a Dictionary Research Test. The first part was aimed at obtaining information about the dictionary users, i.e. their mother tongue, how long they have been studying English, their grades in grammar school. The next few questions concentrated on the dictionaries they own and their reasons for purchasing them, on the frequency of use of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, the dictionaries they use for particular tasks (e.g. while reading a text in English, while translating or checking the spelling), and on their preferred dictionary/dictionaries. The Dictionary Research Test is described below.
Level of Knowledge: The test subjects were asked to give details about the number of years they had been studying English. On average, the majority of the English majors have been studying English longer than the FE students (see Table 1), but all of them studied English in primary school, in grammar school and at the university; five of them stated that they had additionally attended courses in Slovenia and abroad, and one student mentioned watching TV as a means of learning English.
For the purposes of the EURALEX/AILA project, respondents had to undergo a placement test, which is understandable, since the research was carried out in different countries and in different educational systems. Our test subjects were considered as belonging to a more homogenous group: most of them attended schools in Slovenia; they had the same number of English lessons per year and covered the same syllabus. These are the reasons why we considered it unnecessary for them to undergo a placement test. However, we did enquire about the students' average grades in English in grammar school. As is evident from Table 2, the students of English had much higher grades in grammar school (nobody less than a grade B) than the FE students (the majority of them had grades C).
Description of the Dictionary Research Test: Test subjects were asked to list a dictionary or dictionaries they were going to use throughout the test. In some tasks students were encouraged to use dictionaries, whereas in others they were asked not to use their dictionaries. The aims of individual tasks were as follows: testing the students' ability to recognize the correct part of speech, to recognize grammatical properties of words, to locate multi-word lexical items, to select the appropriate prepositional complement, to understand polysemous words in context, to read the IPA, to fill the slot in context and to select the appropriate word to fill the slot in difficult contexts.
Information Prior to the Test: The students were informed about the aim of the test. We asked them not to use their dictionaries in certain tasks and explained the reasons. They were also asked to give details about the dictionary they were going to use in a particular task. When dictionaries were allowed, the students were asked to indicate whether or not the dictionary had been consulted in that particular instance. The questionnaires were completed at home with no time limitation.
3. Results
The Dictionary Research Test consisted of eight tasks, each comprising several questions. Each task was aimed at testing a specific skill, ability or expectation of a dictionary user. The results obtained from the questionnaires completed by the students of both faculties are presented below.
3.1 Identification of parts of speech
Task 1 consisted of six sentences in which students had to identify the part of speech of the word in italics. The majority of the existing monolingual and all of the English-Slovene dictionaries include different parts of speech as separate entries. It is, therefore, necessary for dictionary users to be able to determine the part of speech before looking up a word in a dictionary. In this task dictionaries were not allowed.
If we compare the results of the English majors with those of the FE students, it can be seen that the percentage of correct answers was much higher among English majors. Neither of the two groups of students performed well when they were asked to identify the conjunction after in the sentence 'After you'd left, I got a phone call from John': the question was answered correctly by 20 % of the FE students and 45 % of the FA students. The next most problematic item was the noun present in the sentence 'At present the outlook appears bleak', which was answered correctly by 38 % of the FE students and 55 % of the FA students. Both groups seem to have the fewest problems with the identification of just as an adverb in the sentence 'He has just arrived' (74 % of the FE students, 95 % of the FA students). The results of Task 1 are summarized in Table 3.
(*) The correct answer.
Although this was a rather uncomplicated task, the results are not as good as expected for the group of FE students, where the percentage of correct answers ranges between 20 % and 74 %. It can be assumed that these respondents have difficulty in looking up the right part of speech when consulting their dictionary. On the other hand, the FA students performed better, since the percentage of correct answers ranges between 45 % and 95 %. Interestingly, in five out of six questions the FE students' answers indicate that the students could not decide to which part of speech to assign the word in question; therefore all four possible answers were chosen. The FA students, on the other hand, narrowed down their selection to two of the given answers in as many as three questions (in two questions they selected only one part of speech, and the 'don't know' response). The reason is obvious, since the latter group represents students of English who study English grammar in great detail during the first three years of a four-year programme.
3.2 Recognition of the grammatical properties of words
Task 2 tested whether students are aware of certain grammatical restrictions and properties of English words (e.g. transitivity/intransitivity, verb complementation, countability/uncountability, predicative/attributive use). The students were encouraged to use their dictionaries. As we can see from the results (see Table 4), correct student answers range from 10 % to 72 % in the group of FE students and from 55 % to 100 % in the group of FA students. As far as checking words in a dictionary is concerned, we can see that only a very few of the FE students used their dictionary (from 2 % to 8 %); it seems that their choice of answers may have depended either on their previous knowledge or on their choosing the correct answer by chance rather than by their consulting the dictionary. In the group of FA students, nobody consulted their dictionary in two questions, whereas 20 % of them checked the last example where they had to select the adjective lone, used attributively to fill the slot in the sentence '_____ women drivers are advised not to pick up hitch hikers'. Fifty-five percent of them gave the correct answer, as opposed to 10 % of the FE students (where only 6 % consulted their dictionaries).
The results concerning the use of dictionaries give cause for concern, especially in the group of FE students, who obviously found the task much more difficult than the FA students. Only very few respondents actually consulted their dictionaries in both groups, although that factor was less critical among the English majors, who were probably more familiar with the grammatical properties of the words in question than were the FE students.
The FE students seem to be more under the influence of their mother tongue than the FA students, a feature which can be seen in the incorrect use of the complementation of the verbs discuss and enter in the sentences 'You should discuss _____ with your doctor' (the choice from: a. about this problem, b. this problem, c. on this problem, d. over this problem), and 'Soldiers entered _____, apparently searching for weapons' (the choice from: a. in the houses, b. into the houses, c. to the houses d. the houses). The mistakes they made were due to the fact that discuss is transitive in English but intransitive in Slovene, where it should be followed by the preposition about (48 % of the FE students and 95 % of the FA students gave the correct answer, but only 8 % of the FE students and no one in the group of the FA students consulted their dictionaries). Similarly, the verb enter is intransitive in Slovene but transitive in English, a distinction which misled 54 % of the FE students (only 4 % consulted their dictionaries), whereas all the FA students answered it correctly (5 % consulted their dictionaries). The respondents seem to have been sure about the correctness of their answers because so few used their dictionaries.
(*) Correct answer.
On the whole, students' look-ups were successful, since only five out of 18 look-ups performed in this task were unsuccessful. The results show that the FE students had more problems than the FA students, since, in the latter group, only one student failed to find the correct information in the dictionary he/she consulted (see Table 5). Among the dictionaries used, most of the students chose one of the monolingual learners' dictionaries, but the FE students also used the ESD, which is much less suitable for this task. The ESD is a "passive" dictionary intended for native speakers of Slovene when decoding, that is why the emphasis is on the meaning rather than on the grammatical peculiarities of English.
3.3 Lexical items and their expected place in a dictionary
Task 3 tested students' expectations of where in the dictionary they can find different (multi-word) lexical items (e.g. idioms, phrasal verbs, compounds). The use of dictionaries was not allowed, since students might have believed that the correct answer could be found in their dictionary. This is, of course, not true, since the inclusion of multi-word lexical items and special meanings of, say, plural nouns differs from dictionary to dictionary. Our initial hypothesis was that students would not consider a multi-word lexical item as a separate entry word. The results of the survey confirm this hypothesis, since only 2 % to 22 % of the respondents regarded a multi-word lexical item as a separate entry word. Twenty-two percent of the FE students and 10 % of the FA students would look up the phrasal verb come through as a separate entry, but it can be assumed that some students believe that phrasal verbs are independent entries in monolingual learners' dictionaries, although they are included as run-ons. The rest of the answers comply with our expectations, i.e. dictionary users try to find a multi-word lexical item under the noun if it contains one (see Table 6).
3.4 Selection of the appropriate prepositional complement
Task 4 tested students' ability to find the correct prepositional complement of various English words. We selected grammatical collocations that present problems for native speakers of Slovene (i.e. grammatical collocations that are different in English and Slovene). If students were not acquainted with the correct preposition, they were supposed to check it in a dictionary. The results show that the FA students were more aware of the fact that the choice of a correct preposition in English poses problems for native speakers of Slovene. This is reflected in a slightly higher percentage of FA students who consulted a dictionary (from 5 % to 30 %) if compared with the FE students (from 4 % to 20 %). As far as performance is concerned, the FA students achieved far better results, a result which is in accordance with our expectations. If we mention only the first example, where 28 % of the FE students provided a correct answer when choosing the correct preposition at following the adjective surprised. Twenty percent of them did use their dictionaries, which is the highest percentage of look-ups in this group of students. In contrast, 70 % of the FA students gave the correct answer, and 30 % consulted their dictionaries. The results of this question are summarized in Table 7.
(*) Correct answer.
The only example where native speakers of Slovene could have been misled by their mother tongue was the use of the preposition by in the sentence 'Profits declined _____ 6 % this year'. The preposition by (chosen by 50 % of the respondents in the FE group and 75 % in the FA group) is often mistakenly replaced by the preposition for (chosen by 44 % of the FE students and by 25 % of the FA students). Again, the FA students checked the preposition in 20 % of the cases and the FE students in only 10 %. The use of the correct preposition in the rest of the examples is unpredictable for native speakers of Slovene; it is, therefore, a must to consult a dictionary in case of doubt.
It is interesting to note that the FA students often limited their selection to two answers only; in 4/20 the correct answer was chosen by all the respondents, whereas the FE students were less certain as to which answer to select. Consequently, the latter group of respondents considered all four answers as possibly correct answers.
Table 8 presents the success of students' look-ups. The results show that the FA students were much more successful than the FE students - only two FA students used their dictionaries unsuccessfully, as opposed to nine FE students, the ratio being 32 % : 9.5 %. Both groups of students used monolingual learners' dictionaries as well as the ESD. The majority of students who consulted their dictionaries provided correct answers (38 successful versus 11 unsuccessful look-ups out of 49 look-ups performed).
3.5 Understanding polysemous words in context
Task 5 tested how well students understand polysemous words in context. The students were asked either to provide the Slovene translational equivalent of the underlined word or to paraphrase it in English. They were allowed to use their dictionaries and here the average percentage of students who used the dictionary is higher than in the previous tasks (up to 55 %), a finding which emerged in both groups of respondents. The results of this task are summarized in Table 9.
The question can be asked why students used their dictionaries more often in this particular task than in the previous ones. The answer may be sought in the demands placed upon the students in Task 5. In comparison to the previous tasks where students had to choose the correct answer from several possibilities, Task 5 required that the students themselves had to provide an answer. It is understandable that if they did not understand the meaning of the word in question, they would consult their dictionaries, a pattern of behaviour which complies with our expectation that students use a dictionary while reading an English text and encountering unknown words.
In all questions but one, the FA students achieved much better results than the FE students. The discrepancy between the groups is greatest in question 5/24, where students had to decode the meaning of fast in the sentence 'She held fast to the railings and refused to move'. The FA respondents had absolutely no problem with the meaning of this adverb, since 100 % of them provided the correct answer, whereas only 40 % of the FE students managed to answer this question correctly. The easiest question for both groups, however, is 5/25, where the conjunction for in the sentence 'I told her to leave, for I was very tired' was correctly translated or paraphrased by 96 % of the FE students and 95 % of the FA students.
The preferred dictionary in this task seems to have been the ESD, which was mentioned for all questions in both groups of respondents (see Table 10). This is understandable, since this was a pure decoding task. Apart from the ESD, other monolingual learners' dictionaries were also used. Here, again, the results show that 45 % of the FE students who consulted their dictionaries were unsuccessful (i.e. they provided the wrong answer), as opposed to only 4 % of the students from the FA group.
3.6 Deciphering the international phonetic alphabet
Task 6 dealt with the IPA, which is used in British monolingual (learners') dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of entry words. This task was added to the questionnaire because we hypothesized that a great number of dictionary users in Slovenia cannot read the phonetic transcription. To test this assumption, we included six well-known words (i.e. unimaginative, birthplace, northern, approach, breathing, showgirl) written in the IPA to see whether the test subjects are able to read the phonetic symbols. Dictionaries were not allowed. Our initial assumption proved correct for the group of FE students, since the majority made no attempt to decipher the words, or perhaps, tried to decipher the words but were unable to do so. The percentage of students who gave no answer ranges from 62 % (in unimaginative) to as much as 90 % (in northern and showgirl). As expected, the FA students who have already passed the examination in English phonetics after the first year of study did not really have problems with reading the words written in the IPA (80 % answered all the questions correctly, with the exception of the first one, where 95 % gave the correct answer). The number of those who did not try to provide any answer at all was also much smaller (from 5 % to 20 %).
Instruction in the IPA is on the English syllabus in grammar schools in Slovenia. Students should, therefore, be acquainted with the symbols, but the results show a completely different picture for the FE students, who can be considered more general users of dictionaries, than for the students of English who will become professionals. It is beyond the scope of this research to find the reasons why so many students from the FE group are unable to "read" pronunciation. Is it simply because they have forgotten it, because of lack of practice? Or could it be because they did not deal with it in grammar school? These questions remain unanswered.
3.7 Filling the slot in context
Task 7 tested students' ability to find a suitable word to fit the context. Test subjects were allowed to use the dictionary. The text contained 14 slots that had to be filled with parts of lexical and grammatical collocations.
The results show that neither group really had problems with finding the right word to fill certain slots and in these cases they consulted their dictionaries only very rarely (e.g. questions 7/33, 7/34, 7/39, 7/40, 7/42, 7/44). In questions 7/36 and 7/43 there was a huge gap between the percentage of correct answers (60 % of the FE students but 95 % of the FA students gave the correct answer to question 7/36, and 62 % of the FE students but 100 % of the FA students answered question 7/43 correctly). Here, too, not many students used their dictionaries (10 % and 15 % in question 7/36; 2 % and 0 % in question 7/42). The results of some questions were not as good but in these questions we can see that the percentage of students (especially of English majors) who actually consulted their dictionaries was much higher than in other questions:
Two questions (i.e. 7/37 and 7/41) yielded particularly poor results. In the first of these the students were supposed to find the verb that collocates with the noun prescription. In the group of FE students, nobody gave the correct answer, and only 2 % used their dictionaries. Fifteen percent of the FA students answered this question correctly, and only 10 % consulted their dictionaries. A possible reason for such a low percentage of look-ups may be that the students did not really know what to look up in the dictionary - it is the entries for the bases of the collocations that they should have looked up in their monolingual learners' dictionaries in order to find the right collocator that could be inserted into the slot. In question 7/41 (the students were supposed to provide the preposition against in the sentence 'The medication is reported to be very effective _______ the common cold'), only 6 % of the FE students answered correctly (no one consulted their dictionary), the percentage of correct answers being just slightly higher in the group of FA students (15 %), where 20 % used the dictionary.
We strongly believe that students should be systematically taught which words in word combinations they should look up if they want to become efficient dictionary users. A specialized dictionary of collocations would be of great help in this task, but interestingly, not a single respondent in the group of FE students mentioned that he/she possessed a dictionary of this type (see Table 13). This can lead us to the conclusion that students are unaware of the existence of specialized dictionaries. Here the English majors should be excluded because some of these possess specialized dictionaries of collocations, but they cannot be regarded as general dictionary users, since they are future professionals who, in the course of study, become acquainted with different types of dictionaries and their use.
The results presented in Table 13 show that the FE students performed 30 look-ups, of which only four (i.e. 13 %) were unsuccessful, whereas the FA students used their dictionaries 41 times and were unsuccessful in six cases (i.e. almost 15 %). Interestingly, the FE students used their dictionaries slightly more effectively.
3.8 Selection of the appropriate word
Task 8 tested students' ability to choose the appropriate word from a list of four items to fill the slot in relatively difficult contexts. They were allowed to use their dictionaries.
It can be seen that the percentage of correct answers differs greatly in almost all the questions if we compare the results of the FE and FA students:
(*) correct answer
In comparison with the previous task there were more look-ups (as many as 46 % in the group of FE students and as many as 65 % in the group of FA students). On the other hand, the performance in some examples was quite poor in the group of the FE students (e.g. the students were in two minds about deciding between the verb overcome or surpass in combination with the noun expectations (question 8/47) they were unsure whether to use worth or worthy in '_____ of our serious consideration' - question 8/49). This was not the case in the group of FA students, who performed quite well on all questions (from 70 % to 95 %). Despite the fact that the FE students did have problems with the right choice, they still did not consult their dictionaries often enough.
Table 15 shows the performance of students who used their dictionaries to provide the correct answer to the question. According to these results, the majority of students managed to find the information for which they were looking in their dictionaries (68 look-ups were successful), but again the FA students were more successful than the FE students. The FA students performed as many as 88 % of successful look-ups as opposed to 74.5 % of successful look-ups performed by the FE group. The dictionaries consulted were mostly monolingual learners' dictionaries and in a very few cases also the ESD.
4. Discussion
When studying dictionary use and the dictionary skills of a particular group of dictionary users, we have to consider the dictionaries our test subjects own and use when completing the questionnaire. If we compare both groups of respondents that took part in our research, we can establish that all of them possess one of the bilingual English-Slovene and Slovene-English dictionaries available on the market. As regards monolingual dictionaries, some differences can be observed between the groups of students. Most of the FE students do possess one of the monolingual learners' dictionaries, whereas all the FA respondents, without exception, claim to own at least one if not more dictionaries of this type. We can see that the FE students mostly own the OALD, LDOCE or COBUILD, whereas the FA students add the CIDE and the MED to the list. The ownership of monolingual dictionaries intended for native speakers, however, reveals a different picture. The majority of the FA students, on the one hand, claim to own at least one dictionary belonging to this group (e.g. Random House Webster's College Dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary), while the FE students rarely list one of these dictionaries. The most astonishing information we obtained as regards the ownership of different types of dictionaries was that not a single FE respondent claimed to possess any specialized dictionary. The FA students, however, own and also use specialized dictionaries, among which they enumerated dictionaries of collocations, idioms and phrasal verbs and a dictionary of pronunciation. Obviously, students become acquainted with specialized dictionaries as late as university, which is quite late considering the number of years they have been studying English before the university level.
Comparing the total number of students who used a dictionary when completing the questionnaire, we can establish that 196 FE students performed look-up operations in comparison to 129 FA students. In the group of FE students who used their dictionaries, 133 students (i.e. 68 %) managed to answer the questions correctly. In the group of FA students, 114 students (i.e. 88 %) found the correct answers. The number of unsuccessful look-ups in the FE group amounts to 63 (i.e. 32 %) and to 15 (i.e. 12 %) in the FA group. The results show a much better performance by the FA students, a finding which can lead to the conclusion that the dictionary training of the FA students yields positive results in comparison to a group without any specific dictionary training. It must be stressed that all the test subjects attended the same primary and grammar schools with the same syllabus, so we can justifiably assume that the dictionary training language students receive is useful and helps them find the correct answer in their dictionaries. We strongly believe that a lack of dictionary training is also the reason that the FE students used their dictionaries much less frequently than the FA students while completing the questionnaire.
5. Conclusion
The results presented in this article are based on the first research that has ever been conducted into the dictionary use of Slovene learners of English. It can be regarded as a good starting point for further investigation into more specific areas of dictionary use concerning bilingual as well as monolingual dictionaries.
The study was well accepted by the students who completed the questionnaires. When they were asked to make comments about the questionnaire, they said it was interesting because many of them had never consciously thought about dictionaries as study resources. Not until they were faced with this questionnaire had they believed that dictionaries included so much information. Several respondents expressed their wish to receive special training in dictionary use in order to be able to use their dictionaries more effectively.
One of the most important findings of this study is that students should be made aware of the full range of dictionaries, from general-purpose to specialized dictionaries in order to be able to choose the appropriate dictionary when solving their linguistic problems. This should be done especially by raising teacher awareness of the importance of teaching dictionary skills. It would be useful to integrate special exercises designed to teach and learn dictionary skills into coursebooks, so that students acquire the knowledge necessary for effective dictionary use during the course of the educational process. In order to raise teacher awareness, special courses should be offered as part of language degree programmes in universities, which is currently not the case in Slovenia. Apart from that, lectures as well practical workshops dealing with how to teach dictionary skills would be useful for Slovene foreign language teachers and could be organized as in-service courses. Dictionaries cited:
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