Dictionary Look-up Strategies Used by Saudi EFL Students: A Think-Aloud Study

This study investigates dictionary look-up strategies (DLS) while performing a reading task by 10 Saudi EFL English major students. Think-aloud protocol was used as an instrument in this study. The results revealed that the subjects used 31 DLS while reading. Reading L1 equivalents and reading L2 definitions were found to be the most frequent strategies that Saudi students use when referring to their dictionaries. The results also demonstrated that the students use the guessing strategy infrequently and prefer to resort to the dictionary immediately. The data also illustrated that the monolingual dictionary yielded different overall success rates. The users of the monolingual dictionary referred to their dictionary to solve 32 words problems (12.5% of all look-ups).