The Contribution of Dictionary Use to the Production and Retention of Collocations in a Second Language

Ninety five high school learners of English as L2 received thirty sentences without verbs of the target verb-noun collocations. They were asked to fill in the missing verb, first without any dictionary assistance and subsequently with it. Dictionary assistance consisted of three dictionary entries for each of the nouns, from English-English-Hebrew dictionary, LDOCE and either COBUILD, OALD, or CALD. Learners also reported in which dictionary they found each verb. A week later, they were unexpectedly tested on the recall of the target collocations. Three scores were compared: the number of correct verbs supplied with and without the dictionary entries, and the number of verbs retained on the test. Learners’ reports on dictionary effectiveness were analyzed as well. Results showed that at times learners had difficulty finding the right verbs, but often they thought they knew the collocations and did not think it was necessary to consult the dictionary.