Modern educational and computer technology has greatly affected the
design of electronic dictionaries. Various types and sizes have been
produced ranging from hand-held devices to multimedia dictionaries on
CD-ROMs. Unfortunately, little literatur
e exists on their efficacy and the
way these are used; therefore, there is now a pressing need for uncovering
the way EFL learners use these tools.
This dictionary user profile, survey questionnaire, was constructed to
fulfill this need and unearth the electronic dictionary-using habits of Arab
EFL learners and underline the various facts about the names of the
electronic dictionaries they owned, the reasons when, where, why and
how dictionary users employed these dictionaries and whether there was
any particular information they used more often. Endeavour was made to
pinpoint any difficulties in using any category of information and reveal
participants’ look-up habits and attitudes towards dictionaries.
This paper attempts to investigate the way Arab learners of English
deal with weak form items and the difficulty they encounter in using such
grammatical items in context. This problem was approached from two
different avenues. I therefore carried
out two separate tests. The first
test, the pronunciation test, showed that Arab learners have a serious
problem with pronouncing weak form items. The second test, the
identification test, also demonstrated that Arab learners had a problem
with identifying weak form words in context.
