Summary
e article presents the results of the first research into dictionary use conducted in Slovenia 
on a sample of 70 students from the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Arts, University 
of Ljubljana, Slovenia. e first part investigates the profile of the students as dictionary users, 
their level of knowledge, and describes the questionnaire used in the study. e second part 
presents the results of individual tasks with an emphasis on dictionary use and compares the 
achievements of test subjects from both faculties, while the final part deals with the causes 
for these differences and proposes steps that could be taken to increase student and teacher 
awareness concerning dictionary use and dictionary skills. 
Key words: dictionary testing, users’ reference skills, general monolingual and bilingual 
dictionaries
 Povzetek
V članku so predstavljeni rezultati prve študije rabe slovarjev, izvedene v Sloveniji. Študija je 
vključevala 70 študentov Ekonomske fakultete in Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani. 
V prvem delu članka je opisana skupina, na kateri je bila študija izvedena, nivo njihovega 
jezikovnega znanja in vprašalnik, ki smo ga uporabili v študiji. Drugi del obravnava rezultate 
posameznih nalog, pri čemer je poudarek na rabi slovarjev, vključena pa je tudi primerjava 
rezultatov študentov obeh fakultet. V zadnjem delu so navedeni razlogi za razlike med obema 
skupinama in predlogi za izboljšanje rabe slovarjev s strani učiteljev in študentov. 
Ključne besede: testiranje rabe slovarjev, sposobnost uporabnikov za iskanje informacij, 
splošni enojezični in dvojezični slovarji
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.2.1-2.97-106

In the last two decades, a number of research projects have been conducted investigating 
users’ reference skills and needs, as well as users’ habits in the field of dictionary use. e 
conference Dictionaries and their Users, which was organized by Reinhard Hartmann in 
the late 1970s, initiated a period of more intensive dictionary testing. Jerzy Tomaszczyk 
(1979) was the first to study the foreign users of dictionaries more thoroughly and was 
soon followed by Béjoint (1981), who based his investigation partly on Tomasczczyk’s 
(Cowie 1999, 175–98). Later in the 1980s and 1990s, various researchers carried out 
studies concerning different aspects of dictionary needs, skills and use. e focus was 
on many areas of interest, such as definitions, illustrative examples, labels, grammatical 
information, and inclusion of phraseological units; and the trend still continues (Béjoint 
1981; Hartmann 1989; Nuccorini 1992; Bogaards 1992, 1994; Nesi 1994; Atkins 
and Varantola 1998; Dolezal and McCreary 1999; Cowie 1999; Tono 2001; Bogaards 
and van der Kloot 2001; Al-Ajmi 2002; Campoy Cubillo 2002; Nesi and Haill 2002; 
Wingate 2002). Consequently, monolingual learners’ dictionaries have improved a great 
deal, which can be seen if we compare the last editions of, e.g., Oxford Advanced Learner’s 
Dictionary of Current English (OALD) or Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 
(LDOCE) to mention just the British learners’ dictionaries with the longest tradition. 
e oldest among the learners’ dictionaries, OALD, has seen six revised editions since 
1948. It was followed by the LDOCE in 1978, which has been revised three times 
so far. In 1987, the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (COBUILD) was 
first published, introducing many changes to the microstructure. In 1995, the above-
mentioned leading monolingual learners’ dictionaries were all revised and another 
learners’ dictionary, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE), was first 
published; in 2003 it appeared in a revised edition. e Macmillan English Dictionary 
for Advanced Learners (MED), another monolingual dictionary for foreign learners, was 
first published in 2002. But has there also been improvement in users’ capacity to make 
full use of these books? 
In Slovenia, no study has ever been carried out concerning dictionary users and their use of 
dictionaries. is article presents the investigation conducted in order to find out what kind 
of dictionaries users possess, how often and how effectively they use them, what they usually 
look up in their dictionaries, and what they would like to find in their dictionaries but is not 
included.
e investigation was a general type of research which did not concentrate on one particular 
aspect of dictionary use because it seems appropriate to start with a general research objective, 
rather than to address a more specialized issue. 

T est Subjects: e study was carried out among second- and third-year students of the Faculty 
of Economics – they can be regarded as general dictionary users – and second-year students of 
the Faculty of Arts, Department of English – they are future professional users of dictionaries 
who will often have to consult them in their career as teachers or translators.
Level of Knowledge: All the test subjects studied English in primary school, in grammar school 
and at the university. ey had the same number of English lessons per year and covered the 
same syllabus. 
 
T est Design: e questionnaire consisted of two parts (cf. Atkins and Varantola 1998): a 
Dictionary user profile form and a Dictionary research test. e first part was aimed at obtaining 
information about the dictionary users, i.e. their mother tongue, how long they have been 
studying English, and their grades in grammar school. e next few questions concentrated 
on the dictionaries they own and their reasons for purchasing these, on the frequency of use of 
bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, the dictionaries they use for particular tasks (e.g. while 
reading a text in English, while translating or checking the spelling), and on their preferred 
dictionary/dictionaries. 
Description of the Dictionary research test: In the Dictionary research test, test subjects were asked to 
list a dictionary or dictionaries they were going to use throughout the test. In some tasks students 
were encouraged to use dictionaries, whereas in others they were asked not to use them. 
Information Prior to the T est: Before completing the questionnaire, the students were acquainted 
with the aim of the test. We asked them not to use their dictionaries in certain tasks and 
explained why. When dictionaries were allowed, the students were asked to indicate whether 
or not a dictionary had been consulted in each particular instance. 
 e Dictionary research test consisted of eight tasks, each comprising several questions. Each 
task was aimed at testing a specific skill, ability or expectation of a dictionary user. 
 Task 1 consisted of six sentences in which students had to identify the part of speech of 
the word in italics. e majority of the existing monolingual and all of the English-Slovene 
dictionaries include different parts of speech as separate entries.  It is, therefore, necessary 
for dictionary users to be able to determine the part of speech before looking up a word in a 
dictionary. In this task dictionaries were not allowed.
Although this is a rather uncomplicated task, the results were not as good as expected, since 
the percentage of correct answers ranges between 32.5 % and 84.5 %. Neither of the two 

groups of students performed well when they were asked to identify the conjunction after in 
the sentence ‘After you’d left, I got a phone call from John’: the question was answered correctly 
by 20 % of the FE students and 45 % of the FA students. Both groups seem to have the fewest 
problems with the identification of just as an adverb in the sentence ‘He has just arrived’ (74 % 
of the FE students, 95 % of the FA students). On the basis of these results it can be assumed 
that many respondents have difficulty in looking up the right part of speech when consulting 
their dictionary. 
 Task 2 tested whether students were aware of certain grammatical restrictions and properties 
of English words (e.g. transitivity/intransitivity, verb complementation, countability/
uncountability, predicative/attributive use). e students were encouraged to use their 
dictionaries. Correct student answers range from 32.5 % to 86 %. As far as checking words in 
a dictionary is concerned, only very few students used their dictionaries  (from 1 % to 13 %); 
it seems that their choice of answers may have depended either on their previous knowledge or 
on their choosing the correct answer by chance rather than on their consulting the dictionary. 
In the group of FA students, nobody consulted their dictionary in two questions, whereas 
20 % of them checked the last example where they had to select the adjective lone, used 
attributively to fill the slot in the sentence ‘_____ women drivers are advised not to pick up 
hitch hikers’. Fifty-five percent of them gave the correct answer, as opposed to 10 % of the FE 
students (where only 6 % consulted their dictionaries).
e results concerning the use of dictionaries give cause for concern. Only very few respondents 
actually consulted their dictionaries, especially in the group of FE students, who obviously 
found the task much more difficult than the FA students. Only very few respondents actually 
consulted their dictionaries in both groups, although that factor was less critical among the 
English majors who were probably more familiar with the grammatical properties of the words 
in question than were the FE students. ose who did were successful, as only five out of 18 
look-ups performed in this task were unsuccessful. Among the dictionaries used, most of the 
students chose one of the monolingual learners’ dictionaries, but some students also used the 
ESD, which is much less suitable for this task. e ESD is a passive dictionary intended for 
native speakers of Slovene when decoding, that is why the emphasis is on the meaning rather 
than on the grammatical peculiarities of English.  
 Task 3 tested students’ expectations of where in the dictionary they can find different (multi-
word) lexical items (e.g. idioms, phrasal verbs, compounds). e use of dictionaries was 
not allowed, since students might have believed that the correct answer could be found in 
their dictionary. is is, of course, not true, since the inclusion of multi-word lexical items 
and special meanings of, say, plural nouns differs from dictionary to dictionary. Our initial 

hypothesis was that students would not consider a multi-word lexical item as a separate 
entry word. e results of the survey confirm this hypothesis, as only 2 % to 22 % of the 
respondents regarded a multi-word lexical item as a separate entry word. Sixteen percent 
of the students would look up the phrasal verb come through as a separate entry, but it 
can be assumed that some students believe that phrasal verbs are independent entries in 
monolingual learners’ dictionaries, although they are included as defined run-ons. e rest 
of the answers comply with our expectations, i.e. dictionary users try to find a multi-word 
lexical item under the noun if it contains one.
 Task 4 tested students’ ability to find the correct prepositional complement of various English 
words. We selected grammatical collocations that present problems for native speakers of 
Slovene (i.e. grammatical collocations that are different in English and Slovene). If students 
were not acquainted with the correct preposition, they were supposed to check it in a dictionary. 
e results show that the FA students were more aware of the fact that the choice of a correct 
preposition in English poses problems for native speakers of Slovene. As far as performance 
is concerned, the FA students achieved far better results, which is in accordance with our 
expectations. 
As far as the success of students’ look-ups is concerned, the results show that students used 
monolingual learners’ dictionaries as well as the ESD. e majority of students who consulted 
their dictionaries provided correct answers (38 successful versus 11 unsuccessful look-ups out 
of 49 look-ups performed). 
 T ask 5 tested how well students understand polysemous words in context. e students were asked 
either to provide the Slovene translational equivalent of the underlined word or to paraphrase 
it in English. ey were allowed to use their dictionaries and here the average percentage of 
students who used the dictionary is higher than in the previous tasks (up to 55 %).
e question can be asked why students used their dictionaries more often in this particular 
task than in the previous ones. e answer may be sought in the demands placed upon the 
students in this task. Task 5 required that the students themselves provide an answer. It is 
understandable that if they did not understand the meaning of the word in question, they 
would consult their dictionaries, a pattern of behaviour which complies with our expectation 
that the dictionary is used while reading an English text and encountering unknown words. 
e preferred dictionary in this task seems to have been the ESD. is is understandable, since 
this was a pure decoding task. Apart from the ESD, other monolingual learners’ dictionaries 
were also used. 

Task 6 dealt with the IPA, which is used in British monolingual (learners’) dictionaries to 
indicate pronunciation of entry words. is task was included because we hypothesized that 
a great number of dictionary users in Slovenia cannot read the given pronunciation. T o test 
this assumption, we included six well-known words (i.e. unimaginative, birthplace, northern, 
approach, breathing, showgirl) written in the IPA to see whether the test subjects are able to read 
the phonetic symbols. Dictionaries were not allowed. Our initial assumption proved correct 
for the group of FE students, since the majority either made no attempt to decipher the words 
or were unable to do so. e percentage of students who gave no answer ranges from 62 % (in 
unimaginative) to as much as 90 % (in northern and showgirl). As expected, the FA students 
who had already passed the examination in English phonetics after the first year of study did 
not really have problems with reading the words written in the IPA (80 % to 95 % answered 
all the questions correctly). e number of those who did not try to provide any answer at all 
was also much smaller (from 5 % to 20 %). 
Instruction in the IPA is on the English syllabus in grammar schools in Slovenia. Students 
should, therefore, be acquainted with the symbols, but the results show a completely different 
picture for the FE students, who can be considered more general users of dictionaries, than for 
the students of English who are expected to become professionals. It is beyond the scope of 
this research to find the reasons why so many students from the FE group are unable to read 
pronunciation. Is it simply because they have forgotten it due to a lack of practice? Or could it 
be because they did not deal with it in grammar school? ese questions remain unanswered.
 Task 7 tested students’ ability to find a suitable word to fit the context. T est subjects were 
allowed to use their dictionaries. e text contained 14 slots that had to be filled with parts of 
lexical and grammatical collocations. 
e results show that neither group really had problems with finding the right word to fill 
certain slots and in these cases they consulted their dictionaries only very rarely (e.g. questions 
7/33, 7/34, 7/39, 7/40, 7/42, 7/44). In questions 7/36 and 7/43 there was a huge gap between 
the percentage of correct answers (60 % of the FE students but 95 % of the FA students gave 
the correct answer to question 7/36, and 62 % of the FE students but 100 % of the FA students 
answered question 7/43 correctly).  Here, too, not many students used their dictionaries (10 
% and 15 % in question 7/36; 2 % and 0 % in question 7/42). e results of some questions 
were not as good but in these questions we can see that the percentage of students (especially 
of English majors) who actually consulted their dictionaries was much higher than in other 
questions:
– Question 7/35: 44 % of the FE students gave the correct answers (14 % used their dictionaries), 
55 % of the FA students gave the correct answer (45 % used their dictionaries)

– Question 7/38: 66 % of the FE students answered this question correctly (6 % consulted their 
dictionaries), as opposed to 70 % of the FA students (35 % consulted their dictionaries)
–  Question 7/45: 48 % of correct answers in the group of FE students (16 % used their 
dictionaries) and 60 % of correct answers in the group of FA students (60 % used their 
dictionaries)
T wo questions (i.e. 7/37 and 7/41) yielded particularly poor results. In the first of these the 
students were supposed to find the verb that collocates with the noun prescription. In the 
group of FE students, nobody gave the correct answer, and only 2 % used their dictionaries. 
Fifteen percent of the FA students answered this question correctly, and only 10 % consulted 
their dictionaries. A possible reason for such a low percentage of look-ups may be that the 
students did not really know what to look up in the dictionary – it is the entries for the 
bases of the collocations that they should have looked up in their monolingual learners’ 
dictionaries in order to find the right collocator that could be inserted into the slot. In 
question 7/41 (the students were supposed to provide the preposition against in the sentence 
‘e medication is reported to be very effective _______ the common cold’), only 6 % of 
the FE students answered correctly (no one consulted their dictionary), the percentage of 
correct answers being just slightly higher in the group of FA students (15 %), where 20 % 
used the dictionary. 
We strongly believe that students should be systematically taught which words in word 
combinations they should look up if they want to become efficient dictionary users. A 
specialized dictionary of collocations would be of great help in this task, but this type of 
dictionary was selected very rarely. 
 Task 8 tested students’ ability to choose the appropriate word from a list of four items to fill the 
slot in relatively difficult contexts. ey were allowed to use their dictionaries. 
It can be seen that the percentage of correct answers differs greatly in almost all the questions 
if we compare the results of the FE and FA students:
– Question 8/47: 24 % of the FE students gave the correct answer (10 % used their 
dictionaries) and 80 % of the FA students answered the question correctly (35 % used 
their dictionaries)
– Question 8/49: 30 % of the FE and 75 % of the FA students responded correctly, the 
percentage of the look-ups being 6 % and 5 %, respectively;
– Question 8/50: in the group of FE students, 46 % answered correctly (36 % consulted 
their dictionaries), whereas 80 % of the FA students provided the correct answer (40 % 
consulted their dictionaries);
– Question 8/51: 64 % of the FE students gave the correct answer (46 % used their 
dictionaries) as opposed to 90 % of the FA students (65 % used their dictionaries).

According to the results concerning the performance of students who used their dictionaries 
to discern the correct answer to the question, the majority of students managed to find the 
appropriate information in their dictionaries, but again the FA students were more successful 
than the FE students. 
 When studying dictionary use and the dictionary skills of a particular group of dictionary 
users, we have to consider the dictionaries our test subjects own and use when completing 
the questionnaire. We can establish that our respondents possess one of the bilingual English-
Slovene and Slovene-English dictionaries available on the market. As regards monolingual 
dictionaries, some differences can be observed between the groups of students. While most of 
the FE students possess only one of the monolingual learners’ dictionaries, all FA respondents, 
without exception, claim to own at least one if not more dictionaries of this type. We can 
see that students, for the most part, own at least one of the existing monolingual learners’ 
dictionaries. e ownership of monolingual dictionaries intended for native speakers, however, 
reveals a different picture. e majority of the FA students, on the one hand, claim to own 
at least one dictionary belonging to this group while the FE students rarely list one of these 
dictionaries. e most astonishing information we obtained as regards the ownership of different 
types of dictionaries was that not a single FE respondent claimed to possess any specialized 
dictionary. e FA students, however, own and also use specialized dictionaries, among which 
they enumerated dictionaries of collocations, idioms and phrasal verbs and a dictionary of 
pronunciation. Obviously, students become acquainted with specialized dictionaries as late 
as university, which is late indeed considering the number of years they have been studying 
English before the university level. 
Comparing the total number of students who used a dictionary when completing the 
questionnaire, we can establish that in the group of FE students who used their dictionaries 
68 % managed to answer the question correctly. In the group of FA students 88 % found the 
correct answer. e number of unsuccessful look-ups in the FE group amounts to 32 % and 
to 12 % in the FA group. e results show a much better performance by the FA students, 
which can lead to the conclusion that the dictionary training of the FA students yields positive 
results in comparison to a group without any specific dictionary training. It must be stressed 
that all the test subjects attended primary and grammar schools with the same syllabus, so we 
can justifiably assume that the dictionary training language students receive is useful and helps 
them find the correct answer in their dictionaries. We strongly believe that a lack of dictionary 
training is also the reason that the FE students used their dictionaries much less frequently 
than the FA students while completing the questionnaire.

e results presented in this article are based on the first research that has ever been conducted 
into the dictionary use of Slovene learners of English. It can be regarded as a good starting 
point for further investigation into more specific areas of dictionary use concerning bilingual 
as well as monolingual dictionaries, such as the analysis of the micro- and macrostructure of 
English-Slovene and Slovene-English dictionaries, the ability of users to make good use of 
various types of information found in bilingual as well as monolingual (learners’) dictionaries 
ranging from grammatical information to the inclusion of phraseological units, the role of 
definitions and example sentences within dictionary entries.
e study was well accepted by the students who completed the questionnaire. When they 
were asked to make comments about the questionnaire, they said it was interesting because 
many of them had never consciously thought about dictionaries as study resources. Not until 
they were faced with this questionnaire had they believed that dictionaries included so much 
information. Several respondents expressed their wish to receive special training in dictionary 
use in order to be able to use their dictionaries more effectively.
We believe it was useful for students to complete such a questionnaire, because some of them did 
consult their dictionaries and expressed their opinions about them. It is a matter for concern, 
however, that they are still not willing to use their dictionaries more often – it is only in this 
way that they become familiar with them, their layout and the variety of information they 
contain – and finally become more efficient dictionary users. More effort should be devoted 
to the development of dictionary skills and more time should be spent on teaching dictionary 
use in grammar schools; however, teachers of English should first be trained in how to do it 
and convinced of the necessity of teaching dictionary skills.
One of the most important findings of this study is that students should be made aware of the 
full range of dictionaries, from general-purpose to specialized dictionaries in order to be able 
to choose the appropriate dictionary when solving their linguistic problems. is should be 
accomplished especially by raising teacher awareness of the importance of teaching dictionary 
skills. It would be useful to integrate special exercises designed to teach and learn dictionary 
skills into coursebooks, so that students acquire the knowledge necessary for effective dictionary 
use in the course of the educational process. In order to raise teacher awareness, special courses 
should be offered as part of language degree programmes at universities, which is currently not 
the case in Slovenia. Apart from that, lectures as well practical workshops dealing with how 
to teach dictionary skills would be useful for Slovene foreign language teachers and could be 
organized as in-service courses.

Dictionaries cited: