| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東教育大學 === 英語學系碩士班 === 101 === This study explored Taiwanese university students’ dictionary use in reading different English genre texts and their perceptions of English dictionary consultation. Six university freshmen participated in this study and read an expository and a narrative text. They verbalized the factors for using the dictionary in the stimulated recalls, and reported the reasons resulting in their different consultation behaviors in reading the two texts and their perceptions of dictionary use in the interviews. The stimulated recalls and the interviews were audio-recorded. The data sources for analysis are observation notes, participants' notes, the transcripts of the stimulated recalls and interviews. The findings are as follows.
First of all, the participants consulted a dictionary in different ways in reading the two different genre texts. Secondly, factors leading the participants to use the dictionary include: affective factors, contextual clues, textual organization, repetition, sentence structure, affixes, proper names, words with multiple meanings and synforms. Third, the participants reported that using a dictionary could be beneficial to enhance their reading comprehension and to broaden vocabulary knowledge. The ways they use a dictionary included being selective in using a dictionary, deriving different types of information from a dictionary for different purposes, and their preference for a certain kind of dictionary.
Several pedagogical implications are suggested. First, it may be worth teaching the conventions of English genre texts. Second, teachers can teach how to judge key words for reading comprehension and how to identify if an unfamiliar word can be guessed from context or needs to be consulted in a dictionary. Third, reading strategies can be taught to improve learners’ dictionary skills. Future research can be done to explore the effects of using authentic reading materials, individual differences and using different types of dictionary on learners’ consultation behaviors in English reading
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