How are students led astray when using a bilingualized dictionary for noun countability judgement and article selection?

This paper discusses the results of a research study which investigated the problems that Cantonese ESL learners had when using an English‐Chinese bilingualized dictionary for noun countability judgement and associated article selection. A homogenous group of 30 English majors in a university in Hong Kong participated in the study, which consisted of a noun countability task with and without the use of a bilingualized learner’s dictionary. The study targeted nouns which have varied uses in terms of countability and can be countable/singular/plural or uncountable depending on the context and/or the meaning of the word in that context. Focus was put on how learners were led astray by the given dictionary information, including Chinese translations and their associated syntactic structures.

The results show that although learners are sometimes aware of the importance of contexts on word usage and that different senses of the same word may be associated with different linguistic structures, they may not possess the ability to identify the correct sense of a target noun in a certain context so as to determine the countability of the noun and related article use. Misinterpretation of dictionary examples often occur, but learners are often unaware of their misinterpretations, leading to inappropriate reliance on unsuitable dictionary information for confirming inaccurate decisions. Given that learners’ dictionaries are widely accepted as useful self‐learning resources, errors resulting from misreading/misinterpretation of dictionary information will often go unnoticed and may even be firmly ingrained in learners’ minds. ESL teachers are advised to design relevant dictionary skillstraining programme incorporating metalinguistic analyses to alert learners to the variability of noun countability and related article use as well as the importance of the context in making relevant judgements.