On Arab EFL Learners’ Use of Collocational Information in Electronic Dictionaries

Although research about the use of collocations is growing, there seems to be no single study, to the best of my knowledge, which addresses how electronic dictionaries impact users’ collocational thresholds. This empirical study has been carried out to bridge this gap in the research literature and assess the collocational competence of Arabic-speaking learners of English. The main focus is on their ability to judge the acceptability of verb-noun collocations using electronic dictionaries on CD-ROMs which are claimed to be much more than an ‘ordinary’ reference work.