166
and L2 learning software, they should be made accessible to students to help them
boost their foreign language development
.
In fact, the English Department at Mentouri Brothers University has four or
five foreign language laboratories, of which two are really state-of-the-art
.
However,
and to the best of my belief, these laboratories are rarely exploited as they should be,
as most of teachers do not know how to make use of them, except a few IT-literate
teachers
.
This is partially because teachers were not trained on how to use these
facilities to improve their teaching, especially in classes that such laboratories should
be used for like in oral communication and phonetics
.
As a result, the main purpose
of these facilities has been altered to be used as ordinary classrooms where teachers
give any class each now and then, and particularly when empty classrooms are not
available
.
Furthermore, as the use of smartphones and 3G networks has become very
common in Algerian universities, teachers should encourage their students to have
Android dictionary applications on their smartphones and use them in class whenever
necessary, like when writing and reading, or in an oral communication class which
usually calls for a lot of interaction and lively debates that may break and
communication may fail if students could not express their views in good language as
a result of not knowing the meaning of words or how to pronounce them and use them
correctly
.
167
Conclusion
This chapter outlined and discussed the findings of the present study as a
result of the data analysis phase. On the basis of these findings, some interesting
pedagogical implications for CD use in EFL teaching and learning were outlined and
will hopefully benefit teachers and learners alike to make the most of L2 technology.
The next final section will summarize the whole study
and raise some methodological
issues and limitations that impacted its design. A few recommendations and
suggestions for future research will also be presented in this section
.
Finally, the
testing instruments employed in the study as well as the subjects’ detailed scores
regarding the research variables will be given in the final appendices
.
168
General Conclusion
169
General Conclusion
In the present study, I attempted to examine the effects of using printed
dictionaries compared to CD-ROM ones on reading comprehension and vocabulary
retention of a group of Algerian EFL students
. In fact, although a large proportion of
our students seem to heavily depend on electronic dictionaries of all kinds to deal with
vocabulary, no empirical research investigating their potential effects on L2 learning
could be found in the Algerian context
. This perception, in addition to my keen
interest in electronic dictionaries and language learning technologies in general, have
been an inspiration that prompted me to conduct this research
.
The subjects who took part in this study were 44 EFL sophomores studying at
the English Department at Mentouri Brothers University- Constantine 1
. They
completed two reading tasks on computer screen: using a CD at one time and a PD at
another
. I used a piece of monitoring software installed on the subjects’ computers to
record their lookups in the CD reading condition and to take notes of the exact time
they needed to finish the reading tasks in both conditions
.
In the first reading session, the subjects read a text and answered
comprehension questions with access to a CD, and without them being aware that
their lookups were being recorded
. A week later, they read another text and answered
comprehension questions but using a PD
. However, they were requested to enter their
lookups during reading in a box included in the text itself
. A series of paired-samples
170
t-tests were then conducted to examine if there were any statistically significant
differences between the two conditions regarding reading time, reading scores, and
lookup frequency
. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was also computed to examine
whether there was any kind of correlation between the subjects’ lookup frequencies
and their reading scores
.
As for the vocabulary retention variable, I administered a pretest and a posttest
to the subjects in PD and CD lookup conditions
. In the pretest, each half of the
subjects (i
.e. 22 subjects) read sentences and supplied definitions for ten supposedly-
unknown words using either a PD or a CD
. However, they were not informed that a
vocabulary retention test would be given regarding the words looked up in the pretest
.
A week later, they were given a sudden posttest to measure their retention of the
words they had looked up a week earlier
. Yet, the subjects did not use any dictionary
type but only relied on their memory
. An independent-samples t-test was then
conducted to compare the subjects’ recall of words in the two conditions
.
On the whole, the findings from this study are in line with the ones of previous
similar studies investigating the effects of electronic dictionary use on L2 learning
.
These results suggest that CD use really did have an effect on reducing reading time,
as the subjects managed to finish reading in significantly less time with access to the
CD than with the PD (p =
.000). This reflects the longer time needed to read a passage
using a PD, compared to the CD which seemed to have eased and accelerated the
reading tasks considerably, thereby alleviating the effort needed to read long texts
.
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