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Using bilingual dictionaries
Geoff Thompson has an MA in Modern Languages and another in Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching. After working for three years at Longman (including working on EFL dictionaries), he started teaching English abroad. He has taught in a number of countries, including Hungary; and has most recently been working in China, developing a new undergraduate curriculum for future EST teachers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is currently working in the English Language Unit of Liverpool University.
Monolingual dictionaries for foreign-language learners tend to be unquestioningly regarded as better than bilingual dictionaries. In this article, I discuss whether this is in fact true. Monolingual dictionaries have serious disadvantages in many language-teaching situations: in particular, learners will often not know which word to look up; and, even when they do, the definitions in the foreign language may not help them very much. I argue that bilingual dictionaries are potentially more efficient and more motivating sources of information for language learners. However, new kinds of bilingual dictionaries are needed, and I outline the features that they should have.