How do Slovene learners of English use their dictionaries?

Abstract

The conference Dictionaries and their Users, which was organized by Reinhard Hartmann i.n 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, vari­ ous researchers carried out studies concerning different aspects of dictionary needs, skills and use. The focus was on many areas of interest, such as definitions, illustra­ tive examples, labels, grammatical information, inclusion of phraseological units, and the trend still continues (Atkins 1998, Dolezal and McCreary 1999, Tono 2001, Bogaards and van der Kloot 2001, Al-Ajmi 2002, Campoy Cubillo 2002, Nesi and Haill 2002, Wingate 2002). Consequently, learners' dictionaries have been improved a great deal on the basis of the findings of these studies, which have contributed to a better understanding of average dictionary users, their expectations and the prob­ lems they encounter when consulting their dictionaries.