Students’ use of Portable Electronic Dictionaries in the EFL/ESL Classroom; a Survey of Teacher Attitudes

3. Contexts: Dictionaries, vocabulary and the Good Language Learner; a review of previous studies.

Very little has been published on students’ use of Portable Electronic Dictionaries, or on teachers’ attitudes towards such usage (Tang 1997). Three papers which do discuss PEDs are Nesi (2003), Stirling (2003) and Tang (1997). A discussion of these three papers follows.

Rather more has been written on the general use of other forms of Electronic Dictionary such as online or CD-ROM based systems, and the opportunities they provide to monitor students’ patterns of dictionary use. This chapter seeks to examine some of the contexts relevant to a study of PED usage. Following discussion of the Nesi, Stirling and Tang papers it goes on to examine issues around use of bilingual against monolingual dictionaries; students’ preferences in using Electronic or paper-based dictionaries; dictionaries, learning strategies and the Good Language Learner, and the value of classroom student training in dictionary use. The chapter continues to examine the question “what would you want in an ideal PED?” based on the writing of a number of ELT and Second Language Acquisition theorists, and finally looks at the evidence as to which student groups predominantly use PEDs.

3.1. Three papers – Nesi, Stirling and Tang

3.1.1. Nesi on Electronic Dictionaries and vocabulary

Hillary Nesi’s paper, The virtual vocabulary notebook: the electronic dictionary as vocabulary learning tool provides a marker of the significant difference between PC-based Electronic Dictionaries, which researchers have chosen to use in examining students patterns of dictionary usage, and students’ increasing actual preference for the use of PEDs. Nesi began her study by looking at the CD-ROM edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary, and how its annotation facilities, and the ability it provides for students to create their own word lists, could be used in a teaching environment where students are given training and encouragement to create vocabulary notebooks. However, while the students in her study reacted very favourably to their use of the Macmillan Dictionary, her questionnaire quickly revealed their actual preference for the use of bilingual electronic dictionaries, and in particular PEDs:

“The questionnaire results revealed that the Chinese students were very dependent on PEDs and bilingual dictionary software, so individualised questionnaires were sent to the undergraduate group to gather further information … of the 26 students who owned a bilingual e-dictionary (almost all the Chinese and Japanese students), 23 claimed to use it daily.” – (Nesi 2003 page 2).

As the quotation points out, Nesi also noted the particular preference that students from East Asian countries have for PED use.

Noting this preference for the use of PEDs, Nesi went on to distribute a questionnaire amongst 14 of her Chinese students. She found that they had little knowledge of the lexicographic content of their PEDs, and were more likely to be enthusiastic about the devices’ inclusion of extras such as calculators and address lists. However, they also stressed the importance of portability as being a major advantage which PEDs have over other forms of electronic, and indeed paper-based, dictionary.

Nesi’s questionnaire asked students to list features of their PEDs, as set out in the table below:

Features of pocket electronic dictionaries

Voice pronunciation

Recording and playback of pronunciation

Annotation of entries

Addition of new words and translations

Wordlist creation

Vocabulary tests

Games to practise English

Yes No

7 3

4 10

2 12

3 11

11 3

12 2

Table 1 – Features of PEDs (adapted from Nesi 2003).

Stirling (2003) also found that 9 out the 11 PEDs she examined had some sort of facility for annotation. The features recorded in Nesi’s survey could be useful tools for a strategy-aware learner and are open to exploitation by EFL/ESL teachers. Teachers may need to become more aware of what PEDs can actually do in order to realize the devices’ full potential: as Nesi points out: “we should learn more about our students’ dictionary-using habits and preferences, and more about the contents of the dictionaries they use”.

Nesi moves on to discuss the use of the software-based Jin Shan Ci Ba dictionary package, which is bundled with computers sold in China. In a parallel with the discussion of PED use, she found that while this software package is a very extensively used, there is a total lack of awareness of it in the ELT literature. Reliance on usage of Jin Shan Ci Ba may well be responsible for many of the marked usages that appear in Chinese students’ written work. If there is a general perception amongst teachers of Chinese students that PEDs are responsible for producing the inaccurate translations found in written work completed outside the classroom, it seems quite possible that the source of such inaccuracies is actually Jin Shan Ci Ba, rather than the PEDs with which teachers are more familiar. Finally, in her discussion of Jin Shan Ci Ba Nesi notes an issue which may be common to all forms of bilingual dictionary, that they “encourage the belief that there are constant one-to-one equivalencies between” [L1] “and English words”.

3.1.2. Stirling on The PED in the Classroom

Johanna Stirling’s web-published paper, The Portable Electronic Dictionary: Faithful Friend or Faceless Foe? (Stirling 2003) explicitly examines teachers’ and students’ attitudes to the use of PEDs in the classroom. Stirling uses accounts of classroom transactions to give examples of the very well-grounded reservations teachers may have about the use of PEDs in their classrooms. In her three examples, students use PEDs rather than listening to the teacher’s explicit definition of the word as it has appeared in a specific context; lose touch with a task in which other students are participating by using up the allotted time looking for irrelevant lexis in their PED; and find a totally inappropriate definition for a given headword that has come up in class rather that asking for their teacher’s assistance.

Stirling feels that “the speed and ease of use of PEDs … encourage overuse”. It also seems likely that there is something inherent in PEDs themselves that makes students find them pleasurable to use and leads to overuse; this could be the fascination for using a technology-based item, or what could be described as the ‘small object of desire’ factor.

Stirling conducted a survey of eleven teachers and eleven students (as with Nesi’s research, this seems a small sample) and asked them for their opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of using PEDs. The results are set out below:

Advantages

Disadvantages

Students

· speed(10)

· ease of use (8)

· size (6)

· opportunity to hear words pronounced (2)

· storage facility for recent look-ups

· no English-English dictionary (3)

· insufficient examples

· over-simplified explanations,

· too many choices of meanings per word

· unclear sound

· too many useless features (2)

Teachers

· speed (6)

· students’ feeling of security in seeing translations (2)

· fostering of independence (2).

· possible encouragement of more general dictionary use (1)

· “better than nothing” (1)

· distraction from class (6)

· noise (4)

· inaccurate meanings (3)

· insufficient examples (3)

· unintelligible pronunciation (3)

· students’ over-reliance on them and consequent unwillingness to discuss vocabulary (2)

· lack of collocations

· excess of meanings

· absence of improvements seen in other dictionaries.

Table 2 – Students and Teachers views on advantages and disadvantages of PEDs (Adapted from Stirling, 2003).

Tang (1997) found a similar range of advantages cited by students, including portability, speed, range of features and the availability of sound. However, her students were not aware of disadvantages with PED use.

Predictably, the teachers’ responses in Stirling’s survey focus on pedagogic and lexicographic features, while the students are interested in technological and ergonomic features. Like the students in Nesi’s sample, Stirling’s interviewees place portability high in the list of PED advantages; in contrast with Nesi's group they are not impressed by peripheral extra features their PEDs may possess. The Stirling teacher group, questioned in 2003, can find only five advantages for PEDs against nine disadvantages, and even here two of the quoted ‘advantages’, “possible encouragement of more general dictionary use” and “better than nothing” are hardly deserving of the term.

Stirling quotes the Weschler and Pitts (2000) study on speed of use of PEDs, pointing out that if PEDs tend to be more likely than paper-based dictionaries to encourage off-task look-ups, at least these consultations are faster. However, she makes an extremely useful point about how the look-up process in a PED may contrast with that of the paper based dictionary in its effectiveness as a learning opportunity. Stirling describes a six stage process involving noticing a word, memorising its spelling and encoding it, searching for it sequentially by alphabetical entry, and reading the definition and rejecting other headwords, as against a four stage simplified process for PED look-up. Here the increased complexity of paper-based dictionary look-up has a positive role to play in the learning process, fixing the new lexical item in the learner’s memory. As an example, the fact that entries are arranged in a PED or other electronic dictionary non-sequentially, seen by many writers as an advantage, may be one of a number of features that by making PED look-ups too easy could be seen as barriers to effective vocabulary learning. Stirling says “unlike the learner using the PED, the student with the paper dictionary needs to engage with the English word. This deeper processing is more likely to fix the lexical item into the student’s brain” and she goes on to quote Schmitt and McCarthy (1997) as writing

“the more cognitive energy a person expends when manipulating and thinking about a word, the more likely it is that they will be able to recall and use it later…. learning strategies which involve deeper engagement with words should lead to higher retention than ‘shallower’ activities.”

One respondent to the questionnaire in the current study felt that this line of argument could be extended to any dictionary use, writing:

“Any classroom dependence on dictionaries by students reduces the motivational imperative of the student to make an effort to search for meaning from contextual clues and to listen to classroom discussion aimed at working out meaning”.

Stirling’s findings in patterns of PED usage with students living outside of an L1 environment contrast strongly with Weschler and Pitts’ (2000) study of Japanese students living in Japan. Stirling found that 50% of her student sample used their PED while travelling (Weschler and Pitts’ students claimed not to do this at all), 40% while chatting in English and out of class, and 20% in day to day activities such as shopping. That 40% said they used their PED in conversations out of class - and it seems reasonable to guess that many of these conversations are with classmates where English is the only common language - is interesting. While many teachers feel that holding up conversation while a dictionary is consulted is a barrier to communication, the writer’s field notes contain an example of what could be called ‘social use’ of a PED, where several students engaged in an EAP writing activity shared the same device, working collaboratively to ask each other about definitions and check understanding. To some extent, PEDs are still a novelty, and represent conversation pieces in much the same way that mobile phones did four or five years ago. In fact Stirling draws a very useful parallel on the status of PEDs as relatively new technology between their current place in classrooms and that of pocket calculators when they were first introduced. She feels that teachers should exploit students’ enthusiasm for using PEDs outside the classroom, and that where students are studying in a target-language environment, this offers great opportunities for vocabulary building.

Like Nesi, Stirling finds that it is East Asian students who are most likely to own and use PEDs. She goes on to quote Swan and Smith (2001) in suggesting that this may reflect upbringing in an educational culture which stresses accuracy over risk-taking. She suggests that students may gain some feeling of emotional security by taking PEDs into the classroom, describing them as ‘a security blanket’. She goes on to say:

“Remember that the PED is more than just a machine to some students, it is a comforting link to their own language, an umbilical cord to their mother tongue. It may be that the affective benefits are even greater than the linguistic ones that the machine offers”.

Tang (1997) also comments on this emotional attachment, quoting one student interviewee as describing PEDs as “the student’s best friend”, while another “felt lost when his [P]ED was down”. However, this comment may reflect a change in lifestyle to becoming over-dependent on technological aids, which may be familiar to many personal computer users, as much as an emotional attachment to the device. Laufer and Kimmel (1997) extend this idea, suggesting that a sense of security is provided by accessing a translation into L1.

Again like Nesi, Stirling points out that constant use of PEDs, or any other form of bilingual dictionary, encourages a belief that there is always a direct semantic correlation between lexical items in L1 and the target language. Noting that students’ habits of overuse of PEDs may militate against teachers’ attempts to persuade them that ‘knowing’ every word in a text is not necessary for understanding, Stirling also calls for learners to be trained in effective dictionary use, in particular in developing tolerance for unknown vocabulary. A further point that could be made on overuse is simply that by looking up each and every unknown lexical item they encounter, students are overloading themselves with an unachievable learning burden. However, as Stirling points out, it is the students rather than their teacher who are choosing to use PEDs to look up given vocabulary items. While some teachers may feel that this represents a growth of student autonomy within their classrooms, many will feel that student overuse of PEDs can regularly lead to a loss of focus in class activities. This diversity of opinion is reflected in the extremes of teacher attitude quoted by Stirling, which ranged from ‘“Great to see students using dictionaries independently” to “I won’t have them anywhere near my classroom”’. Such an attitude should possibly be seen in the light of the fact that students may be seen to be using their PEDs at the same time as the teacher is glossing a word, and that the teacher may see this as an indication that the student places greater faith in the accuracy of the PED definition than the one they, the teacher, are giving. Stirling notes significantly, however, that not all students who own PEDs overuse them in the classroom, and that patterns of usage vary considerably.

Stirling briefly mentions an issue which is likely to be a major concern of many teachers faced with the students’ spontaneous use of bilingual dictionaries, that they introduce translation into ‘direct method’, and often multilingual, classes where teachers are attempting to train their learners to think and function in the target language without constant re-reference to L1. She points out that PED use “makes students mentally switch codes and, in my experience, introduces more L1 interference into their writing” and echoing Nesi’s discussion of Jin Shan Ci Ba, that “using an electronic translator for encoding (writing and speaking) can lead to inaccurate, archaic and sometimes comical results”. However, Stirling also found that many of the PEDs her study sample used were actually ‘bilingualised’; hybrid devices which rather than just offering a simple and straightforward translation of the English word into L1, also gave a definition and/or synonyms in English. She found that in classroom experiments users of bilingualised PEDs performed better in tests based round concept questions than students using purely bilingual devices. This was echoed by one of the current study questionnaire respondents based in Japan, who found bilingualised PEDs to be far more useful learning tools than monolingual or bilingual devices. Laufer and Kimmel (1997), meanwhile, conducted experiments using paper-based bilingual, monolingual and bilingualised dictionaries which found that the best scores in a variety of tasks were always obtained by students using bilingualised dictionaries.

Neither Stirling nor Nesi make much of the distinction between students’ use of dictionaries for encoding rather than decoding. However, it seems to be explicit from their writing and from evidence from this study’s questionnaire and the writer’s personal experience that students use bilingual dictionaries for both tasks, but are likely to use monolingual dictionaries only for decoding. McCarthy (1990), suggests “the ideal learners’ dictionary should give a sufficiently clear explanation not only for learners to decode meaning but also to encode without error. This is probably an impossible task …”

Stirling discusses the features which a teacher would recommend if a student were to ask for advice on buying a PED. While this is laudable, it is unlikely that this would happen in the target language environment her research is based on. PEDs can be most easily bought in the countries where the students’ L1 is spoken; where students come to the UK, the US or Australia to study they are likely to bring their PEDs from home, not expect to be able to buy them in country (although Tang [1997] found some students in her study group had bought PEDs since arriving in Canada to study). Advertising in L1, meanwhile, may be inaccessible to teachers. To some extent, learners may see possession and selection of a PED as being outside the teacher’s domain.

Stirling ends with advice to teachers to limit overuse of PEDs, especially where the teacher is already explaining a given vocabulary item to the class, and to become more familiar with how the devices work. This lack of familiarity may be at the root of some teachers’ anxiety about PED use.

3.1.3. Tang on PED strategies

Gloria Tang’s Pocket Electronic Dictionaries for Second Language Learning: Help or Hindrance? is a pragmatic paper based on extensive classroom observation and research. Writing in 1997, Tang points out that PEDs are already being viewed with concern by English Language teachers, and that while this concern may be rooted in the deep-seated belief that translation into L1 should not have a place in the EFL/ESL classroom, it may also be based on teachers’ lack of awareness of how PEDs work. The questionnaire used in the current study suggests that in 2005 these same two reservations still apply. The spread of PEDs since Tang’s Paper was published is indicated by her reference to research by Taylor (1996), who found that 20% of secondary school teachers in Hong Kong reported use of PEDs amongst their students and that 19 out of 26 university instructors (73%) reported undergraduate students using PEDs. In the current study 100% of teacher respondents from China (Hong Kong was not included as a separate territory option on the questionnaire) reported that students used PEDs in their classes. Another factor which has certainly changed since Tang’s study is the cost of PEDs. She quotes costs of $400.00 to $1,000.00 Canadian (£170.00 to £420.00 at current exchange rates). Field interviews with students at Salford University suggest that usable devices can be bought for far less than this, although the top range model demonstrated by one of the writers’ students cost the equivalent of £100.00 in Taiwan. As with any other new technology, falling purchase prices have significant implications for the democratisation of access, and will certainly have led to far greater numbers of PEDs finding their way into the classroom of 2005.

There is some suggestion that the lexicographic content of PEDs has also improved since Tang published her study. She evaluates the PEDs she examines against a ten point criteria list for a good learners’ dictionary, based on work by Hartmann (1992):

1. Wordlist selected according to criteria of frequency and usefulness;

2. Definitions geared to the more limited vocabulary of the foreign [sic] learner;

3. Different senses of the headword clearly discriminated;

4. Collocation detail is provided by example sentences;

5. Grammatical coding is detailed and explicit;

6. Phonetic transcription is international;

7. Stylistic information is given typically by usage labels;

8. Textual transparency is considered desirable;

9. Historical-etymological information is avoided;

10. Cultural information is (occasionally) provided, for example, by pictures.

Tang found that the models of PED she examined conformed to few of these criteria, but it seems likely that 2005 devices would pass more of them, although Number 8 ‘textual transparency is considered desirable’ seems rather vague and unquantifiable. Number10, looking at cultural information, may make Hartmann’s work rather of its time, given the emphasis in current debate on English’s status as a Global Language (Crystal 1997), divorced from any particular national or ethnographic heritage. The suggestion of use of pictures is still current, with 10 questionnaire respondents considering it a feature they would like to see in PEDs - in fact the writer has seen more than one current PED which features pictures, together with animations to illustrate verb meanings. However, many of the criticisms Tang makes, including the lack of collocational information, and the inconsistency in provision of example sentences, are echoed by the descriptions of PEDs given by respondents to the current questionnaire.

Tang’s study was based on secondary level ESL students at three schools in Vancouver, and looked exclusively at the usage of PEDs by Chinese-speaking students. She reports that the student enrolment of at least one of the schools includes students from other Asian countries such as Korea and Vietnam, but makes it explicit that she wanted to work with Chinese speakers because of the insight provided by her own language abilities. While this may be seen as limiting the study’s global applicability, the current survey shows that speakers of Chinese languages are by far the largest linguistic group to use PEDs worldwide. Furthermore, the writers’ recent field observations have all been done in classes where PEDs are exclusively used by Chinese speakers (either from the People’s Republic of China or Taiwan), although he has previously encountered Arabic, Japanese and Korean students bringing PEDs to class. Tang’s status as a speaker of the students’ languages allows her to, for example, discuss the different operation of PEDs aimed at either Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, and examine the orthographic implications for Chinese character entry during look-ups. She found a correlation between students’ successful use of PEDs and their level of L1 literacy. Given the complexity of Chinese character-based orthography, this is possibly a correlation which might not map easily on to other language speaker groups.

Tang also feels that there is a cultural dimension to students using PEDs to a level which some teachers may consider overuse. She considers that to these students, learning a language is “synonymous with acquiring as large a vocabulary as possible … or attaining literacy”, and that to them ‘knowing a word’ meant being able to translate it into Chinese. It could certainly be argued that these beliefs are not unique to secondary-level Chinese students studying in Canada. However, Tang found that for these students, encountering a text containing unknown words, finding translations of the individual words was of far more importance than making sense of the passage as a whole.

Given the different emphasis of her research, Tang recorded students using a different set of features in the PEDs she examined from those discussed by Nesi. These included bilingual dictionaries and idiomatic reference material, but also an ‘English roots’ section containing entries on English names, prefixes and suffixes; a phonetic drills section offering practice at a segmental pronunciation level; noun lists; travel dialogue; a ‘listening and learning’ section; and a sentence making option offering jumbled sentences with answers, as well as help sections and the usual options such as calculator, diary, notebook, organizer, and games. Unlike Nesi, Tang’s research was not aimed at investigating the annotation options of the PEDs she examined, although she does record some students keeping rather disorganized paper vocabulary notebooks based on PED look ups.

Tang quotes research by Gu (1994) which indicated that weaker students are likely to look up more words in a text than stronger students. Gu’s work was based on think-aloud techniques with students using paper dictionaries. What may have changed with the emergence of PEDs is that more students bring PEDs to class than ever brought paper dictionaries, possibly for entirely non-linguistic reasons such as the status that can be acquired in the eyes of one’s peers by having the latest electronic device. (Tang’s teacher respondents felt this was a problematic issue). This means that weaker students may now be more likely to have access to dictionaries on their desks in class than was the case in the past.

Tang is the only writer surveyed who looked at how students used PEDs via classroom observation rather than questionnaires or interviews, and found that reading and listening comprehensions were the tasks where they were most likely to be consulted. This contrasts strongly with the findings of Nesi, who writes that students were unlikely to use PEDs for listening tasks, and that the division of skills was between reading and writing, where they were likely to be consulted, and speaking and listening, where they were not. For students in Tang’s study group English-Chinese look-ups to help in decoding a text were significantly more successful than Chinese-English look-ups intended to find an appropriate word during a writing activity.

Looking up grammatical information was seen by students in Tang’s study group as being an essential part of PED usage. They felt that knowing a word’s part of speech, in particular, was an essential part of decoding it or decided on its appropriacy. However, only 20% of the students in the sample understood all the abbreviations that dictionaries used to define parts of speech.

Eighty-five percent of Tang’s sample used their PEDs to check pronunciation. She found that not only audible pronunciation functions were used, but that many students consulted the phonetic transcriptions given, and sometimes copied them into their vocabulary notebooks. However, the students were rarely able to read these transcriptions back accurately.

Tang identifies back translation as a strategy used by many students in the study group. The writer has developed the following technique for vocabulary look-ups with his predominantly Chinese-speaking classes, attempting to exploit the fact that only an outright ban on PED use will stop students using bilingual functions:

Tang goes on to examine and map the processes involved in a dictionary consultation, contrasting the procedures of weaker and stronger students. For the stronger students Tang identifies a six stage look-up process. This tends to suggest that the look-up process may be more complex than Stirling (2003) found, and rather undermines the theory that the more complex processes involved in look-ups in paper dictionaries are more likely to fix a word in a student’s memory and result in long-term learning.

Tang’s analysis of teachers’ opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of PEDs includes significant parallels with the work of Stirling six years later. Both recorded speed of look up to be an advantage of PED use – Tang reports that 20% of her respondents thought this was important. Tang records 40% of respondents thought ‘confidence’ was important, while Stirling’s study group talk about ‘students feeling of security in seeing translations’, and ‘fostering of independence’. However, while 20% of Tang’s group go on to detail the advantages of PED use in content learning; this is not part of the rather negative discourse of Stirling’s teacher group. This does not stop Tang’s group from criticizing PEDs for ‘odd usage’ (80%), incomplete entries (10%) and incorrect entries (20%).

There are also parallels between the findings of Tang and Stirling when it comes to the disadvantages teachers recorded. In Tang’s group, 10% of the respondents considered PED use to be ‘antisocial’, while 54% of Stirling’s group considered it to be a ‘distraction from class’, and 36% mentioned noise as being a problem. Both authors found over-reliance to be an issue; Tang's teacher group extended this to ‘not willing to take risks’, and Stirling’s to ‘consequent unwillingness to discuss vocabulary’. Both researchers listed the poor quality of pronunciation as being a disadvantage, Tang’s group (60%) calling it ‘artificial’ and Stirling’s ‘unintelligible’.

Interestingly, Tang’s respondents added ‘status symbol’ to their list of disadvantages. However, her sample is of secondary level school students, where discipline problems arising from class rivalries may be an issue that is irrelevant to the University level teachers surveyed in Stirling and Nesi’s studies. In fact, the age of Tang’s participants, some as young as 13, adds an additional dimension to her study. In a similar way, 10% of Tang’s teacher group record ‘pass [P]ED around’ as being a disadvantage; field notes by this writer include an example of collaborative use of a PED during a group task which he felt enhanced learning and was worthy of further research and experiment. Tang also records her teacher respondents mentioning that the high cost of PEDs is a problem; by Stirling’s study in 2003 prices have dropped and in 2005 this is no longer a significant issue, although as Tang points out, PEDs are still a target for thieves.

In conclusion, Tang feels that there are some contexts in which students’ use of PEDs should be discouraged; here she parts company with Stirling who merely feels that students should be told not to use their PEDs during specific classroom activities. Like both Nesi and Stirling, Tang concludes that the way forward for teachers lies in expanding their own knowledge of how PEDs work and what they do, and in effective dictionary training work which can exploit the PED’s potential as a learning tool. A significant finding in Tang’s paper is that using a PED does constitute a linguistic processing task of the sort that can lead to language acquisition. Tang found students in her study group:

“did interact with the text and look for contextual clues as best they could. Only they needed the [P]ED, or any bilingual dictionary, to make that necessary link before they could do the linguistic processing and the guessing. Maybe it was the [P]ED or other bilingual dictionary that forced the students back to the text”.

Tang ends by recommending that teachers discuss PED use with their classes. Sadly, there was only limited evidence from responses in the current survey that this is being done.

3.2. Contexts

The following section moves on from the discussion of papers dealing specifically with PEDs to look at some wider contexts around their use in class. The section includes discussion of research based around student use of paper dictionaries in class, and research with other forms of electronic dictionary.

3.2.1. Bilingual and monolingual dictionaries

Tang, Nesi and Stirling all found that the predominant student usage of PEDs was in bilingual mode. This has clear implications for classrooms where the teacher has concerns about the use of translation into L1 based on pedagogical or SLA issues.

Laufer and Hill, in their paper What lexical information do L2 learners select in a CALL Dictionary and how does it affect Word Retention? (2000), point out that

“different people, when given the choice, consult different types of dictionary information …Some prefer translations, some explanation in L2, others a mixture, and some access different information for different words.”

While this is may be true, it is open to question what proportion of the generality of language learners, both inside and outside of the EFL/ESL community, actually own and make use of monolingual dictionaries in the target language, be they learner dictionaries such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOC) or dictionaries such as Larousse which are published for a native audience. Nesi (2003) found an overwhelming preference for the use of bilingual electronic dictionaries over monolingual book dictionaries amongst her sample of 35 students studying at a university in the UK, while Laufer and Kimmel (1997) surveyed a number of empirical studies indicating students’ overall preference for bilingual dictionaries. Teachers may overlook the fact that, while monolingual dictionaries contain all the information for a given headword that they feel the student needs, this may actually be overburdening the student with excess information. However, Laufer and Kimmel’s survey suggested that learners were aware that monolingual dictionaries were of more help to them, but still preferred bilingual ones (also similar findings by Tomaszczyk 1979 in Schmitt in Schmitt and McCarthy 1997).

3.2.2. Student motivation in using PEDs and other forms of Electronic Dictionary

Laufer and Hill’s paper aims to discuss how computer-terminal based dictionaries can be used to log and track exactly which items students look up, a monitoring activity which would probably be impossible with students using PEDs. They go on to quote research by Roby (1991 and 1999) which found that “[students] who used an electronic dictionary looked up significantly more words than those who used a paper dictionary”. This seems evidently true for students with PEDs, who, among their core language groups, far outnumber those who bring paper dictionaries to class and appear in some cases eager to use their PEDs to the extent of looking for an excuse to do so. They go on to make this point about the relative ease of use of PEDs and paper dictionaries:

“studies show that L2 readers often decide not to use the dictionary when meeting unfamiliar words in a text (Bogaards, 1998; Hulstijn, 1993). One of the reasons often reported by students is the time involved in flicking through the dictionary pages and the subsequent disruption of the flow of reading. An electronic dictionary may provide a good solution to this problem.” (Laufer and Hill 2000)

What Laufer and Hill may have missed is the point that not only do learners find using paper-based dictionaries irksome and tedious, and using PEDs attractive and enjoyable, they may be so motivated to use their PEDs that their use becomes counterproductive and begins to degrade learning. Laufer and Hill are more upbeat in their predictions however, saying:

“The ease and speed of using [PEDs] may encourage the learner to look up unfamiliar words. This in turn, will not only contribute to more fluent reading, but will also increase the chance of acquiring the looked up words”

They go on to make a significant point out about PEDs possibly increasing student motivation:

“If a pedagogical tool is popular with the students, the chances are it will also be beneficial for learning”

However, they go on to say:

“A counter argument could be levelled at electronic dictionaries claiming that the ease of use will result in shallow processing of the looked up word and will therefore be detrimental to retention. Our results do not support this position. Any attempt to explain why this is so would be only speculative”. (page 68)

Interestingly, Laufer and Hill find variation in performance between their two parallel study populations, in Israel and Hong Kong, which hint at a correlation between differing levels of enthusiasm for using technology-based dictionaries and students’ linguistic, cultural and/or national origins. They also describe as ‘evident’ their finding that Chinese learners prefer a monolingual dictionary approach contrasting with the bilingualist path favoured by Israeli students. They further suggest that Chinese students are more likely than Israeli students to seek pronunciation information on unknown words from dictionaries. They suggest this is because Israeli students share an L1 which has an alphabetic orthography, and so are used to "sounding out" words; with Chinese orthography there is little to connect symbol and sound, and in fact a single Chinese character is often connected with a variety of phonological words depending on which Chinese language or dialect is being spoken (Swan and Smith 1997). Part of the appeal of PEDs may be that many feature an audible pronunciation option, allowing students to hear how the unknown word should sound, without having to learn sometimes complex and often confusing systems of phonetic transcription. This is an advantage of electronic-based dictionaries which paper-based dictionaries can never hope to compete with. However, Stirling (2003) found the pronunciation options on the PEDs she examined to be of poor quality and inaccurate, while Tang described the sound on the devices she saw in 1996 as “synthetic … not always clear, and the pronunciation is artificial”.

3.2.3. Look ups in PEDs and Paper Dictionaries

Laufer and Hill cite research by Aust, Kelley, & Roby (1993) which also indicates that using electronic dictionaries is more popular than using paper-based ones, but which goes on to demonstrate that there is no significant difference in student comprehension between the two media. Research on comprehension and retention by students using PEDs in class, contrasted with groups carrying out similar tasks using paper dictionaries, might be enlightening.

Research by Weschler and Pitts (2000) suggested that looking up an entry in a PED is around 23% faster than looking at the equivalent entry in a paper-based dictionary. This actually seems surprisingly slow, and may reflect the move in technology of the last five years since they wrote their study, or indicate that the small size of PEDs may make their interfaces hard to work with. The authors also make several references to the high cost of PEDs when compared with conventional dictionaries, which is no longer a major issue. Weschler and Pitts’ study is also of interest because their research population consisted exclusively of female students studying English in Japan, their L1 environment. Their student questionnaire found that students were not especially enthusiastic about using the audible pronunciation functions on their PEDs, “suggesting that few students have any intention of actually trying to say their newly acquired words”. It seems likely that students using their PEDs in a target-language environment, where correct pronunciation is essential for communication on the day to day basis, might respond differently. Nesi (2003), researching with students in the UK, found that they preferred using PEDs over other forms of Electronic Dictionary while reading printed texts and writing by hand, and to a lesser extent while speaking and listening. Where students’ work led them to be at a computer, they preferred to use computer-based dictionaries. The implication of this is that students are unlikely to take the task of looking up a word to the computer, where no other reason to use it exists and/or an alternative such as a PED is available. Nesi further suggests that this usage marks a move away from patterns of consultation revealed by previous research concentrating on paper dictionaries, where usage was predominantly for reading rather than writing, and hardly ever for listening and speaking. Further research which looked at students’ use of Electronic Dictionaries during the two separate skills of listening and speaking would be valuable. On the distinction between PED and PC based dictionary use, Stirling (2003) suggests that screen size, and the consequent limit on the amount of information that can be displayed, will always put PEDs at a disadvantage.

Weschler and Pitts (2000) also comment on the tendency of students to look up more words than they need to understand a given text. They describe this tendency as "the absorbing sponge syndrome" and comment “it seems that the sponge is rarely squeezed”.

Stirling (2003) states that although some PEDs feature item definitions written in English, of the students she interviewed “all said they consulted the L1 translation first when decoding”.

Much discussion in the authors quoted focuses on the differences between learners’ use of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries. Monolingual dictionaries are seen as indications of the strategies which characterise Naiman’s et al’s ‘Good Language Learner’ (Naiman, N., Frohlich, M., Stern, H.H. & Todesco, A 1978); valid meaning may be more or less difficult to extract from them according to the lexicographer’s design, but it will be there. Bilingual dictionaries are seen as potentially misleading; their use implies unmotivated students who overrely on translation.

Batenburg (1991), discussing printed dictionaries, implies that the distinction between bilingual and monolingual dictionaries should be blurred, suggesting ‘parallel dictionaries’ in which entries in both (or indeed, each) language are given the same depth they would achieve in monolingual dictionaries. Respondents in the questionnaire in the current study discuss ‘bilingualised’ PEDs which share some of these features. Batenburg also argues for a far greater use of pictures in dictionaries, and this is echoed in Collison (1982) who traces the first use of illustration in printed Foreign Language Dictionaries back to 1936 but finds the lack of exploitation of this powerful tool for communicating meaning to be ‘surprising’. The writer has found using image search engines such as a Google Images valuable as a means of quickly accessing defining pictures when concrete nouns connected with unknown objects have come up in computer lab based classes. Where the entire resource of the Internet is available as a picture dictionary there would need to be compelling reasons for using a dedicated and closed-set PC-based Electronic Picture Dictionary. Pictures are, however, already becoming available on PEDs.

Given the fact that printed dictionaries become physically larger as their contents increase, Batenburg’s suggestions can only really be seen as a theoretical desiderata with them; however, with currently available technology including vastly increased storage for minature electronic devices (such as the miniature hard drives installed in the Apple iPod range of MP3 players), better and smaller display screens, and wireless or phone-based connection giving access to the limitless storage potentials of the Internet, a Batenburg dictionary no more obtrusive than a 2005 PED becomes a real, and in fact likely, possibility. Future teachers would need to give serious consideration to the potential for such dictionary power in the hands of students, more especially if the current unequal distribution of PEDs between differing language groups remains an issue.

3.2.4. PEDs and learner strategies

The much discussed ‘Good Language Learner’ was first identified in a 1978 study by Naiman, Frohlich, Stern, and Todesco. While there have been criticisms of the study – the Naiman group did not seem to do much research on whether the strategies they found used by Good Language Learners were also employed by ‘Bad Language Learners’ or spend time identifying and interviewing weaker learners (Skehan 1989), and their sample was culturally limited (Nation, P 1989) – their study remains influential.

In the Naiman group’s hypothesis Good Language Learners are mainly good at learning languages because they are ingenious in the development of learning strategies. His group identified five metastrategies employed by the Good Language Learner. It is worth looking at each strategy and considering how classroom use of a PED matches it:

Strategy 1: Active task approach: good language learners actively involve themselves in the language learning task.

Bringing a PED to class would appear to signal active involvement in learning.

Strategy 2: Realization of Language as a System.

The awareness of the importance of vocabulary learning, and use of any dictionary, would appear to indicate a system-based approach to language.

Strategy 3: Realization of Language as a means of Communication and Interaction.

Here how a PED is used provides the context. A poor learner may place his PED in the path of communication, using it for example as a barrier to avoid becoming involved in classroom tasks. The Good Language Learner may carry his or her PED around during their daily activities, using it to check and learn new language items encountered.

Strategy 4: Management of Affective Demands.

This strategy involves learners in an awareness of the difficulty and complexity of the language learning process and involves them in monitoring their own learning capacity. The Good Language Learner might wish to restrict the time he or she spent looking up vocabulary if aware that it was unlikely to be retained.

Strategy 5: Monitoring of L2 performance.

Naiman, Frohlich, Stern,and Todesco, (1978) tell us that Good Language Learners constantly revise their L2 systems. Poor learners may feel that regular consultations of their PEDs are all that they need to master the target-language.

From the above it would appear that it is hard to state categorically whether bringing a PED to class marks a student out as a Good Language Learner or is a mark of a demotivated student. Like any tool the context in which a PED is used tests its validity, not the tool itself (Schmitt in Schmitt and McCarthy 1997).

Dörnyei and Thurrell, in a paper Strategic Competence and How to Teach it (1991) identify ‘strategic competence’ as an essential element of the communicative approach. Strategic competence encompasses those skills which enable a speaker to get meaning across to their listener. Dörnyei and Thurrell suggest that such a skill set is discrete from those skills traditionally seen as attributes of linguistic competence in a good language learner, such as good knowledge of grammar and a wide lexical base. As such, “strategic competence exists fairly independently of the other components of communicative competence". A level of strategic competence is necessary in any circumstances where the speaker needs to communicate messages which their linguistic resources prevent them from communicating successfully.

Dörnyei and Thurrell go on to subdivide strategic competence ploys as falling into two sets of strategies; message adjustment strategies, and resource expansion strategies. In the former the speaker may accept that it is not possible to fully get their message across. With resource expansion strategies the speaker risks failure but attempts to remain in the conversation. These strategies may include:

· paraphrase or circumlocution;

· approximation in lexical choice;

· non-linguistic ploys such as mime, gesture, imitation or drawing;

· borrowed or invented words. (Dörnyei and Thurrell do not point out that such words may actually be features of the speaker’s intralanguage which he/she is not aware of having ‘borrowed or invented’).

One common feature of the use of Portable Electronic Dictionaries is the readiness with which some users resort to them during conversation, compared with similar use of a paper dictionary (the writer has on several occasions been approached by students wishing to discuss aspects of their course and looking up difficult concepts ‘on the fly’ as they speak to him). Although Weschler and Pitts (2000) found that the students in their sample did not use PEDs in this way, or use them while travelling, their research was carried out in the L1 environment of Japan, rather than an L2 location where target language use may be necessary for day-to-day survival. Such use may be seen as a resource expansion strategy; however it can get in the way of the flow of communication and as such could be seen as a communication avoidance strategy. Furthermore, use of PEDs may seem to encourage an attitude among students that it is more important to break off interaction while the exact and specific lexical unit is retrieved via the dictionary, than it is to take one’s part in a natural and ongoing human exchange. (Stirling 2003)

Dörnyei and Thurrell go on to suggest a number of activities designed to encourage users to be aware of and use “thinking time” discourse markers or ‘fillers’ (‘umm’, ‘let me see…’ ‘well’). Several of these activities involve constructing nonsense utterances which may be beyond the level of all but the most advanced classes, and which many groups would find culturally challenging. It could be suggested within discourse that use of a PED is a strategy to gain thinking time but given the complexity involved in the task of retrieving words, this might be contentious.

3.2.5. What features should be included in a PED designed to be an efficient learning tool?

3.2.5.1. What features should be included in a PED? - Collocations

A feature for that one would hope to find in [both monolingual and multilingual] Electronic Dictionaries would be some guidance on the use of collocations and compounds. McAlpine and Myles (2003) go so far as to say “we believe it should be the aim of the ESL lexicographer to include all the more or less fixed expressions cohering around a node word”.

Bahn (1996, quoted in Schneider 1998) analyzed a number of printed dictionaries, and graded them according to whether or not they dealt with collocations listed on a 1000 item corpus. Bahn went on to suggest ways in which qualitative treatment of collocations could improve access for learners:

· Collocations should be listed under entries for all component words;

· Collocations should be highlighted or should be allocated a separate place in the structure of the entry.

Nation (2001) points out that although collocations are frequently mentioned, ‘knowing’ a word involves far more than simply being aware of which other words are commonly used with it. Such items of knowledge include whether a word only ever usually appears in writing, or whether it is part of the spoken language; the context in which it can be used, and if there are constraints on its use.

3.2.5.2. What features should be included in a PED ? – Examples of Usage

While many learner dictionaries such as COBUILD use corpus-based authentic examples; Amritavalli (1999) suggests with some circularity that “corpus-based 'genuine' examples are argued to be incomprehensibleas well as inauthentic for learners”.

3.2.5.3. What features should be included in a PED ? – advanced look-up and retrieval.

Dodd (1989), possibly envisaging a future of mainframe-based electronic dictionaries, predicted fourteen possible criteria for fuzzy searching, including search routes such as:

· “sounds like A;

· rhymes with B …

· includes the word L. in its definition”.

Fifteen years after Dodd’s paper was published, pocket PEDs provide none of these facilities, although they may well feature calculators, memo facilities and games. It seems little attempt is made in the design of PEDs to exploit the sort of advanced look-up facilities which can only be available via a computerized dictionary.

Lexicographical information is rarely given in the advertising or specifications for specific PEDs (Nesi 2003), though when it is they are generally stated to be based on a particular printed dictionary. Sometimes advertising stresses the source of lexicographic content within a respected printed authority (Aiko Trading Company advertisement 2005).

Dictionaries ordered according to a conventional alphabetic structure may present problems to learners. Attempts have been made to produce printed learner lexicons where vocabulary is accessed by topic or notional field, such as the Longman Language Activator and the Oxford Learner’s Wordfinder Dictionary, but these may involve complex look-up procedures and are often not popular with teachers or learners. Trappes-Lomax (1997) claims in his preface that the Oxford Learner’s Wordfinder Dictionary (OLWD), “instead of giving you the word first and then its meaning, … gives you the meaning first and them the word (or words) you are looking for.” Schneider (1998) suggests that this is an aspiration which Trappes-Lomax’s OLWD does not wholly achieve, pointing out that it retains an alphabetic structure.

It is in the nature of electronic dictionaries that they are non-linear; they have no front or back covers, and the user does not have to leaf through them to find the relevant entry. As such they would seem the ideal platform for a look up system based on Trappes-Lomax’ or Dodd’s ideas. McAlpine and Myles (2003) quote Bolinger (1990), in saying "… hard-cover … [ESL] dictionaries … have about reached their capacity. Any really dramatic advance would burst the covers" and then go on to outline how physical space is not a limitation in an electronic format, and, in the case of the online platform they are describing, a dictionary can be endlessly extended and continuously updated, adding up to a model of continuous rolling publication. They further describe how an experimental cognitive look-up system might work in such a dictionary. McAlpine and Myles’ model is based on theory; Mackintosh (1998) describes a study which aims at examining how learners use dictionaries, with a view to the results informing the design of a new electronic dictionary.

However, while this level of flexibility and experimentation may be possible with electronic dictionaries based on open platforms which allow researchers to experiment, it seems that in the case of most PEDs design is not informed by lexicographic innovation or pedagogical theory. There is no reason to suppose that this lack of innovation is due to technological limitations, but rather a lack of imagination or, indeed, the possibly paradoxical idea that innovation on a metacognative level does not sell technology-based products.

3.2.5.4. What features should be included in a PED ? – Phonetic access

Sobkowiak (1994) makes an important point in connection with learners’ use of all dictionaries. Looking up a word in a dictionary involves being able to spell it, but many learners first encounter words in spoken form and are unaware of what the correct spelling is. In the case of PEDs this involves entering the individual letters of a heard lexical item on the keyboard, or running through a list of items whose spelling approximates the heard item. How often this process takes place would be a fruitful target for further research; Weschler and Pitts (2000) found that “students do not trust their ability to catch correctly the words that they do hear” adding “perhaps rightly so”. The ‘wildcard’ facility Stirling (2003) found on several of the PEDs she examined, which allows users to enter a question mark or other character for unknown letters, would be of some help in this process.

Sobkowiak describes the process whereby heard language is converted to text and then searched for in a dictionary to extract meaning as ‘graphemic mediation’. He points out that a non-native listener is faced with many problems in extracting discrete words or units of meaning from the flow of suprasegmental speech. These problems might include transmission noise, phonetic reduction, or idiosyncrasies specific to the speaker.

Sobkowiak discusses the concept of the PAD – the Phonetically-Accessed Dictionary. He is concerned with segmental models of pronunciation, and is concerned both with both how such a dictionary would access and create words by combining phonemes, and how it would be sequenced. As discussed above, sequencing is not an issue in an electronic format which provides random and non-sequential access.

Although Sobkowiak discusses technology-based PADs, what he appears to be proposing is a device in which the student would enter pronunciation using IPA or some other graphic transcription system, imposing yet another obstacle between hearing and understanding. Current technology offers the option to design PEDs whereby the user could speak the heard word into the device and extract a definition.

However, to create a PAD based on recognition of a word spoken into its microphone, current technology would probably approximate the architecture of the speech-recognition engines built into some modern Word Processor systems and into Operating Systems such as Microsoft XP. It seems extremely likely that such speech recognition software is based on a database of sound samples of recognized whole words. Creating words ‘on the fly’ by aggregating phonemes and then attempting to reproduce them as readable text is likely to generate orthographic problems with voice-to-text systems, though this seems to be the architecture of the voice production systems on some PEDs, which produce sounds for words which are already in the database, but do not have to guess at an unknown heard word.

(A field interview with a Taiwanese student at Salford University suggests that this process of phonetic aggregation is precisely how the voice production technology in most PEDs works. The student demonstrated a recently-purchased high specification PED, which featured graphics and many of the other features teacher respondents to the questionnaire felt might be useful. He explained that his PED features two voice options; ‘real voice’ and ‘machine voice’. ‘Real voice’ is not available for each word, but the student was able to demonstrate an example using the word ‘apple’. This word had clearly been sampled in its entirety, and was definitely superior in sound to ‘machine voice’ examples. The student also demonstrated that the machine is able to pronounce nonsense words; it did this with the invented word ‘scrogit’. Clearly then the ‘machine voice’ is constructing suprasegmental pronunciations from aggregations of individual phonemes. The student pointed out that the offering of ‘real voice’ and ‘machine voice’ options was not an especially new feature of PEDs, although PED-using students in a later group had never heard of this distinction.)

As mentioned above, that this technology is available is apparent to modern users of Word Processing software. This dissertation is partly being written using the Speech Recognition option built into Microsoft Word 2003. As the writer speaks into a microphone the program recognizes the words used and displays them in the document. Although errors are not infrequent, using speech recognition software with a headset microphone leaves the hands free to make ongoing corrections on the keyboard in the conventional way. This radically reduces the number of keystrokes needed and, significantly, bypasses many spelling issues. If voice recognition can be used with a word processing package, which must imply a very large database of possible words which can be recognized, it can certainly, with current technology, be attached to a dictionary database. Unfortunately, it is likely that a margin of error will always be inherent in speech recognition technology. While it seems evident that modern implementations of speech recognition have some grammar and word-frequency knowledge built in and do not simply work on a word recognition level, it would seem to be inherently beyond current technological paradigms to build in the kind of cultural and contextual knowledge which allows human speakers and listeners to differentiate between most homonyms.

Sobkowiak suggests that where a PAD encounters close homonyms, the definition presented to the dictionary user should be based on word frequency, essentially a system which presents the user with definitions ranking entries by textual probability (and such prediction may be a feature of today’s Word Processor Voice Recognition systems). He goes on to argue for the inclusion of frequency information in all learner dictionaries and also sees far-reaching implications for curriculum design through widespread use of PADs.

3.2.6. Can training improve learners’ use of PEDs?

“All studies reveal, that foreign language learners, as a default, resort to a bilingual dictionary, unless they are forbidden to do so.” (Zöfgen 1994)

It seems clear that effective training in dictionary use benefits learners and improves their performance in tasks where dictionaries can be helpfully used. In a study called “Dictionaries can help writing – if students know how to use them” Jacobs (1989) gave three classes a passage correction test. Only one of the classes was instructed in dictionary use; here the use of a paper monolingual learners’ dictionary. Results showed improved performance in the final examinations amongst the class that received instruction, and a far greater willingness to use dictionaries in classwork.

Despite these studies, dictionary training does not appear common in the ESOL classroom, possibly for logistical reasons. Schneider (1998) claims “that the vast majority of language learners do not know how to use dictionaries is hardly their fault. Dictionary techniques and effective user strategies are rarely mentioned in language curricula and rarely taught in foreign language classrooms.” This may be unfair, and Schneider gives little evidence to back it up. Curriculum designers come up against the problem that students will not usually carry one single prescribed dictionary. In recent years some Course Book publishers (and in many EFL contexts the course book is the curriculum) have attempted to get round this issue by including ‘dictionaries’ in the student package. An example is provided by the ‘Cutting Edge’ series. However, these are not dictionaries in the true sense, but rather glossaries of the new language presented in the book.

While Jacobs’ work was based around a single, specific, printed dictionary, the EFL classroom teacher who wishes to exploit Portable Electronic Dictionaries brought to class by students faces similar problems of diverse dictionary choice amongst students to those faced by curriculum designers. The dictionaries are likely to be extremely heterogeneous; they will have been produced in different countries for the use of different language groups. Many manufacturers produce PED models at different levels of cost, with more expensive models featuring a larger word list and more facilities. All the electronic dictionaries the writer has encountered have been primarily bilingual, with the user interface based around the student’s own language. (Higher specification models may offer a monolingual option). In a class a teacher may encounter a situation where a percentage of students, but not all, have PEDs, and where those students that do have them have dictionaries based on a variety of L1s and of widely varying quality. A teacher wishing to provide a class of PED users with instruction in their most effective use does not have a standard and specific dictionary which each learner in class can use, and cannot hope to be familiar with each model of PED being used. In this situation the teacher would either have to provide instruction based on a generic model of dictionary use, or possibly teach a class based round printed dictionaries and then discuss with learners how their new skills could be applied to electronic dictionary use.

3.2.7. Who uses PEDs?

Nation (2001) discusses the concept of the “learning burden” of lexical items, stating “different words have different learning burdens for learners with different language backgrounds and each of the aspects of what it means to know a word can contribute to its learning burden”. Thus if the target word has a cognate in the learner’s L1, or is a loan word, or if the student’s first language shares grammatical and phonological features with the target language, the word will be easier to learn. What follows logically from Nation’s argument, and seems almost a truism, is that any given first language learner group will have a greater or lesser learning burden with any given target language. Spanish speakers are likely to find it far easier to learn Italian them to learn Polish. The greater the language distance, or difference in terms of linguistic morphology, between the learner’s first language and the target language, the harder they will find it to learn words. By coincidence it seems the students who may be amongst those with the greatest learning burden for English learning – speakers of East Asian languages and Arabic - are the most likely to bring PEDs to class.

It has been suggested that use of PEDs by East Asian students is symptomatic of a general passivity and unwillingness to be involved in classroom activities that has its roots in the educational cultures of the countries in which these students grow up (Flowerdew and Miller, 1995 and others quoted in Cheng 2000). This seems a sweeping overgeneralsation, which in a paper Asian students' reticence revisited Xiaotang Cheng (2000) describes as ‘a groundless myth’. What does seem reasonable to suggest is that the students come from countries where PEDs are more cheaply and easily available than other students’ home countries, and cultures in which microelectronic devices are extremely popular and fashionable.