An Empirical Study On Application Of English Dictionary Use Training To English Learning In Senior High School

English is the main language in high school foreign language education.With social life and economic activities increasingly globalized,the nation has higher and higher requirements in English proficiency of high school students.In English learning of senior high school students,effective usage of the English dictionary is one of the important learning strategies and most high school students have easy access to English dictionary.In recent years,some English experts and teachers have paid more attention to dictionary use,which has also been covered and described in the National New Curriculum Standard of English(2003).However,the number of researches about dictionary usage training is small.What are the existent problems of senior high school students in English dictionary use? Can the vocabulary levels and English comprehensive ability of high school students be improved by English dictionary use training? The experimental study attempts to solve the problems.Through questionnaires,the author launched an investigation into 114 high school students in Linfen No.12 High School before training.According to the results of this investigation,the author found that most high school students use English dictionary in the English learning process,but there exists some problems: the purpose during using dictionary is single;they cannot find the meaning they want quickly;they often do not fully understand the information contained in the dictionary;the students lack appropriate and specific guidance of dictionary use strategy from English teachers;they do not take notes in time after consulting a dictionary.Towards the problems above,the author did special dictionary usage training in class.The subjects are 82 students of Grade One in senior high school from two selected classes in Linfen No.12 High School and they all are taught by me.The author designated one class as the Control Class,the other as the Experimental Class and trained the students from EC to use dictionary in class.Before training,the author has done some tests to prove that the students from the two classes are in the similar level with the achievements of vocabulary level test and senior high school entrance examination.After a semester’s training,the author tested students’ vocabulary knowledge level again.After analysis of the vocabulary level,the results show that there are significant differences of the vocabulary knowledge test between the EC and CC and the students in the EC have higher mean scores in vocabulary knowledge test after training than the students in the CC.Also,the author analyzed the scores in the final-term examination after training between the two classes and the students in the EC get higher scores in the final-term examination after training than the students in the CC.Besides,there are significant differences in the final-term examination after training between the EC and CC.Therefore,dictionary usage training has a positive effect upon English learning of high school students and English teachers are supposed to give senior high school students appropriate guidance.At last,the author made a detailed description to the research findings and analyzed the limitations of this study.Meanwhile,the author proposes that teachers should teach high school students to use dictionary correctly and effectively and gives some suggestions about future dictionary usage training.