Bilingual Dictionary Use and Incidental Lexical Acquisition in Korean EFL Reading

This study compared the effectiveness of two approaches for achieving incidental L2 vocabulary learning through reading Thirty Korean university students were randomly assigned to one of two reading conditions in which they read a short story in English The treatment condition allowed the use of dictionaries, so that unfamiliar words could be looked up the control group had no access to dictionaries, and were expected to guess from context the meaning of unknown words The reading task was preceded by a pretest on target lexis items from the story, and followed by a surprise vocabulary posttest The results indicated that a) a significant level of overall vocabulary learning took place during reading, b) no statistically significant difference existed between the dictionary and context-only conditions