| With the popularization of the Internet and the increase of importance of English in Chinese social life, more and more Chinese have come to use the Internet, and the English online dictionaries become a wonderful assistant for the internet users. This kind of dictionary has played a great role in English language teaching (ELT), translation, theoretical research, etc. However, there are still some problems existing in English online dictionaries, such as inaccurate definitions, inadequacy in technical terms and lack of up-to-date new words and expressions, deficiencies in usage labels, errors in translation and so forth, which are quite inconvenient for their users. Hence, the performance of current prevalent domestic English online dictionaries is not quite satisfactory by now.User-friendly dictionaries are defined as the ones that provide the target dictionary users with information that they need in the most convenient way. This thesis is an attempt to discuss issues of user-friendliness in the currently prevalent English online dictionaries for advanced EFL users. To this end, the thesis adopts the theoretical research, empirical study and comparative analysis to describe the merits and demerits of such online dictionaries, conventional printed dictionaries and CD-ROM dictionaries to figure out the distinctive features of English online dictionaries from other prevalent types of dictionaries. Starting with a diachronic survey of the development of the domestic English online dictionaries, the author conducted a user survey to reveal the deficiencies of the currently popular English online dictionaries in meeting the needs of advanced English learners in the light of user perspective, reception theory and the theory of the dictionary as communication.The major contribution of the thesis is, through analysis of the problems of online dictionaries based on user needs, the tentative solutions to the problems of user-friendliness in English online dictionaries according to the survey for the benefit of compiling more practical, more user-friendly, more reliable English online dictionaries with better response performance. |
