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In the past two decades, more and more dictionary usage studies have been published, but most of them deal with the question what users appreciate about dictionaries, which dictionaries they use and which information they need in specific situations. These studies presuppose that users indeed consult lexicographic resources. However, language teachers and lecturers of linguistics often have the impression that students use too few high-quality dictionaries in their every-day work. Against this background, we started an international cooperation project to collect empirical data evaluating that impression. Our aim was to evaluate what students (here from the Romance language area) actually do when they correct language problems. We used a new methodological setting to do this (screen recording with a thinking-aloud task). The empirical data we gained offers a broad insight into what language users really do when solving language-related tasks today.
Many studies on dictionary use presuppose that users do indeed consult lexicographic resources. However, little is known about what users actually do when they try to solve language problems on their own. We present an observation study where learners of German were allowed to browse the web freely while correcting erroneous German sentences. In this paper, we are focusing on the multi-methodological approach of the study, especially the interplay between quantitative and qualitative approaches. In one example study, we will show how the analysis of verbal protocols, the correction task and the screen recordings can reveal the effects of intuition, language (learning) awareness, and determination on the accuracy of the corrections. In another example study, we will show how preconceived hypotheses about the problem at hand might hinder participants from arriving at the correct solution.
Wiegand’s opus magnum „Wörterbuchforschung“ ends with a chapter on the state and the relevant taslcs for research into dictionary use in the middle of the 1990s. This article aims at reflecting the taste and the relevance of dictionary usage research 20 years later. I will argue that the fundamentally changed lexicographic landscape makes it necessary to shift the focus of research. In my view, the most important aim of research into dictionary use can no longer be limited to improving dictionaries. Research into dictionary use should also raise more awareness for user- orientation in general and should provide methodological reflection to enlighten the increasingly important usage statistics for online dictionaries. Another goal should be to look behind the scenes of collaborative dictionaries in order to provide background data to classify their relevance in relation to dictionaries elaborated by lexicographic experts. The crisis of lexicography makes it also necessary to broaden our view and concentrate on situations in which linguistic questions arise. In this context, we could examine in which of these situations the consultation of lexicographic data helps. In summary, the aim of research into dictionary use is to identify the fields where sound lexicographic work is really helpful for potential users.
In this contribution, we present a novel approach for the analysis of cross-reference structures in digital dictionaries on the basis of the complete dictionary database. Using paradigmatic items in the German Wiktionary as an example, we show how analyses based on graph theory can be fruitfully applied in this context, e. g. to gain an overview of paradigmatic references as a whole or to detect closely connected groups of headwords. Furthermore, we connect information about cross-reference structures with corpus frequencies and log file statistics. In this way, we can answer questions such as the following ones: Are frequent words paradigmatically linked more closely than others? Are closely linked headwords or headwords that stand more solitary in the dictionary visited significantly more often?
We start by trying to answer a question that has already been asked by de Schryver et al. (2006): Do dictionary users (frequently) look up words that are frequent in a corpus. Contrary to their results, our results that are based on the analysis of log files from two different online dictionaries indicate that users indeed look up frequent words frequently. When combining frequency information from the Mannheim German Reference Corpus and information about the number of visits in the Digital Dictionary of the German Language as well as the German language edition of Wiktionary, a clear connection between corpus and look-up frequencies can be observed. In a follow-up study, we show that another important factor for the look-up frequency of a word is its temporal social relevance. To make this effect visible, we propose a de-trending method where we control both frequency effects and overall look-up trends.