The use of online dictionaries by non-native English speakers to write English texts : A case study of the production of a business text by MULT-students

Details

Supervisors

De Cock, Sylvie

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue

Abstract

We have entered the electronic age. For users of English as a foreign language, this results in incomparably more help available online than a few decades ago, but that in turn raises the question of whether these improvements have had much influence on English users’ actual process of using dictionaries. This dissertation seeks to determine whether a group of MULT-students make use of online dictionaries to their full potential when confronted with the task of producing an English business text. The two underlying questions it attempts to answer are the following: - What type of online dictionary strategies do students privilege for each kind of lexical problem they encounter? - To what extent might their academic background influence their dictionary-use behaviour? The data for this research comes from table format questionnaires filled in by thirty-two advanced learners of English while writing a press release. In this chart, they were asked to describe their online dictionary consultations while producing the text. The results obtained were examined in a quantitative analysis. The participants are all students of the master’s in Multilingual Business Communication at the Catholic University of Louvain. They are an academically heterogeneous group given that they completed different bachelor’s degrees before they embarked on the master’s degree.