The Place of pedagogical lexicography among Algerian EFL secondary school’s students

Abstract EN

This study reports on the results of a questionnaire, an interview, and a classroom observation on the Algerian EFL secondary school students’ attitudes toward dictionaries and their uses.

Eight hundred students from different levels (first year, second year, and third-year) participated in the study.

The results showed that secondary school students held moderate positive attitudes towards dictionaries and their uses.

Algerian students seem to appreciate the role of dictionaries in the teaching-learning process.

Moreover, the results indicated that most Algerian EFL students preferred using the bilingual dictionary over bilingualized and Monolingual dictionaries in terms of language and online dictionaries in terms of the format.

Students appear to be aware of the different strategies they use during the dictionary look-up operations, but they need more training and supervision by school teachers at the primary stage.

The participants used their dictionaries mainly to look up word meanings.

The study identified three main difficulties that Algerian learners face while using their dictionaries.

These were; the difficulty of understanding phonetic symbols, finding the word’s appropriate meaning, and the inadequacy of illustrative examples used in the dictionary.

The results also revealed that the participants lacked dictionary use training.