This paper is an account of a study of the role played by a dictionary (in this case, the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987)) in the completion of written (encoding) tasks by learners of English as a foreign language The study uses an introspective methodology based on the completion of flowcharts The results highlight, in particular, the importance of information on spelling and meaning and the central role accorded to the examples for obtaining a wide variety of information, notably on meaning, grammar, and register COBUILD's full-sentence definitions together with its real examples are revealed to be of considerable use to learners on the other hand, coded syntactic information in the dictionary is largely neglected by learners Implications for lexicographers and for language teaching and learning are considered
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Harvey et al. (1997) studied this question.