A further look into the use of a dictionary APP in EFL writing: A replication study

Abstract

The study replicated the experiment by Chen and Liu (2022), investigating the effect of dictionary use on EFL writing. It involved the same research variables as the original study except for adopting a different dictionary. Sixty-two English majors took two writing tests, one without dictionary assistance, the other with access to a mobile phone dictionary application which features a combination of an L1–L2 and an L2–L1 dictionary for bidirectional search. The application can keep a record of users' search inputs and entry clicks. A questionnaire was also conducted to survey the students' evaluation of the dictionary application. Different from the negative results found by the original study, the replication revealed a non-significant effect of dictionary use on writing performance, providing solid evidence that a better dictionary leads to fewer consultation errors, although the improvement in writing scores brought about by dictionary use was only marginal. The study confirmed the original finding about the positive impact of dictionary use on lexical sophistication. It also identified some differences in dictionary lookup patterns between the participants of the replication and the original study in terms of search frequency, preference for language search, preference for search items, and use of source dictionaries. The implications of the study for dictionary making are discussed.