The impact of a Dictionary Writing System based on literary pieces on high school students’ EFL linguistic competence

Abstract

The compilation, management, and publication of electronic dictionaries through Lexonomy provides a user-friendly environment for a user without advanced technical knowledge. It is, therefore, an efficient tool for the lexicographical processing of demanding texts, such as literary works, in the teaching of English as a foreign language. This research is based on the principles of didactic lexicography for language learning and aims to analyze the effectiveness of creating and using a monolingual digital dictionary created ad hoc by students for learning English as a foreign language. To this end, an exploratory empirical intervention was conducted over two school years (2020–2021 and 2021–2022) with 159 ninth-grade students from a high school in Madrid, who were randomly divided into a control and an experimental group. To collect data, the results of four tests (two per school year) of the two groups were analyzed in order to check the effectiveness of the digital dictionary created by the students on the one hand and the traditional paper glossary used by the control group in their notebooks on the other. The results confirm the hypothesis that using an ad hoc digital dictionary improves vocabulary learning and English as a foreign language (EFL) linguistic competence by enhancing the comprehension of unabridged literature. Practical implications for the creation of digital dictionaries in EFL classrooms are discussed.