W 099 F

Introduction

Bilingual university students need dictionaries, but many of them have problems with using them. I understand them very well as I am an English major, too. In the first year I had to confront applying dictionaries because there were a lot of texts to interpret and several essays to write. After I read ten of my groupmates' writings I noticed that most of them did not pay enough attention to accuracy. They aimed at trying to find the easiest way to get over with their work quickly and apply words that come to their minds at once. They told me that using dictionaries was a waste of time. They did not even know any techniques to improve their writings. I would like to give some help to them by presenting what kind of dictionaries an English major uses and how she applies them for essay writing.

Method

I interviewed one of my classmates who also attended a writing course this year. I chose Zita (the name has been changed to avoid recognition) because as she was one of my best friends, I assumed that she would not reject to answer my questions. I recorded the talk on tape to be able to listen to it as many times as I wanted, and this way I could quote some of her views as well. I made the interview in a room in the dormitory one day before I wrote this research paper. I did not really need to ask her a lot of questions because when she heard the first question ”How do you use dictionaries for essay writing?” she told me everything in detail. Zita works for the U.S. Army, so she has a special wordpower, full of American slang. That is why I was interested if she needed any dictionaries at all. I wondered if she was afraid of using words that may have seemed awkward for those readers who did not speak American English. I asked her what kind of dictionaries she preferred for writing and what her opinion was about them.

Results and discussion

Zita said that she, as a first-year student, also had troubles in writing mainly at the beginning of the semester. She had had to write some essays before but those could be called short stories. Her English teacher did not consider the essay writing serious, and although she had a dictionary did not need to open it at all. She built the words and expressions, which she picked up from the American soldiers, into the texts. Her classmates thought that as she could speak English almost fluently her essays must have been the same good. As she said she did not know what to do with the topic she got for the first time. She suspected that she must grasp it in an other way than before. Strictly speaking, she was scared a bit that the non-formal words she used would not fit in the context.

While she was writing her essay she looked the formal adequates of the words in the Synonym Finder to take her work more variable. According to her, that dictionary is useful but difficult to choose the right expression from the long list. "You cannot know which word has a meaning in the context unless you have read a lot in English before", said Zita. For these reasons "Synonym Finder must be used with caution. Even though two words may be quite similar in meaning, the substitution of one for the other may not always be appropriate, and the writer’s intent may be ill served." Zita also told me that the book also helped her when the proper word did not occur to her at a particular moment, though it was on the tip of her tongue.

Zita realised, after she had written her first essay at the university, that she had to be more careful with her spelling. Several American words are spelled another way, and teachers told her not to mix the British and American spelling. Since then she has been taking care of looking up the words that existed in British English.

If she does not recognise the meaning of the term she looks for the information in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary because it includes the most current English. Besides the authors of it took care of every single detail and the definitions are clear and easy to follow. She often uses the wordbook for solving grammar problems because it has study pages that give answer even the basic linguistic questions. "Oxford Learner's Dictionary provides me the biggest help while writing an essay", said Zita. It is not just a list of words and their meanings. It contains much more information that can help to write good, natural English. For writing something she considers how to link one word to the other in a sentence important. The dictionary gives her instructions about the grammar of a word and about the structures that often follow it. It also tells whether the word is formal or informal, helping her to select what is appropriate for a particular context.

On one occassion she looked up the equivalent of the word 'writer' in the Synonym Finder because the expression appeared in her essay a lot of times. She chose the term 'scribe', but since she doubted the meaning she checked it in the Oxford Dictionary. She found the following definition under the headword: "a person who made copies of writings before printing was invented". After reading it she realized that she had to look for another, more adequate word.

Zita also has a bilingual dictionary by Országh László, but she applies it for essay writing only on few occasions. It contains much more expressions, idioms, and prepositions than the earlier editions, but its word content still makes up of some old and old-fashioned words. That is why Zita do not find it suitable for writing. She uses it only that time when she has the idea of a word only in Hungarian. Then she can do nothing but look it up in that dictionary.

Conclusion

On the basis of an English learner’s ideas I have presented how the different dictionaries gives help for writing. Zita told me everything in detail about the content of three types of wordbooks and about why each one has advantages for writers. They had to open them more seldom than the beginners if they have mastered the foreign language perfectly. But they may hesitate even then and look for a better word or expression in the Synonym Finder, the unknown terms in the Országh László Dictionary and the grammar in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.