Exploring the use of bilingual dictionaries for developing EFL vocabulary at Liceu 26 de Abril nº 1677 - lubango

Abstract

The purpose of this study aimed to explore the students’ and teachers’ attitudes and perceptions about the use of dictionary for developing EFL students´ vocabulary at Liceu 26 de Abril Nº 1677-Lubango, while that, students had problems when using vocabulary. That is to say that, the lack of instruction in dictionary use is the reason. Consequently, students were not able to learn English as a Foreign Language Efficiently. For this research, 30 students and 10 English teachers were taken to participate as samples. It was used two questionnaires (i.e. for teachers’ questionnaire and students’ questionnaire) were used as data collection instruments. Therefore, the main findings obtained from this study reveal that (1) students don’t take advantages of Bilingual Dictionary at all while that teachers recommend monolingual dictionaries than bilingual and the reason has to do with misconception (2) Electronic dictionary, On-line dictionary and Pocket electronic dictionary seem to be unknown tools in the process of learning EFL, which means that students are not able to take advantages of all types of dictionaries (3) 93%) of the respondents (students) undertakes that they never were taught on how to use a dictionary, as a result, students encounter so many difficulties in the use of dictionary. Morever, the study concluded that to reduce the problems, students should be tought on how to use dictonaries and to explore the different types of dictionaries.