Online Dictionaries and the Involvement Load Hypothesis: An Empirical Study

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This paper explores the relatively under-researched area of online dictionary usage by EFL learners. Despite the inconvenient truth that students are increasingly choosing to utilize online dictionaries over their traditional paper and handheld electronic counterparts, this shift has not been sufficiently reflected in EFL literature – particularly in terms of how such technology could be affecting incidental vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension. This paper sought to explore this line of inquiry within the frameworks of the involvement load (Laufer and Hulstijn 2001) and consultation trigger point hypotheses (Aust, Kelly, and Roby, 1993). Thirty undergraduate students studying English as a foreign language at a Japanese university completed a reading task followed by a reading comprehension test and a delayed vocabulary recall test. During the reading task, students were assigned a dictionary tool to use, either Weblio or Google Translate, with varying involvement load indexes. A battery of Mann-Whitney tests did not identify significantly different performances under the two dictionary conditions. A small to medium effect size was identified (r = -0.25), indicating that dictionary type was impacting vocabulary recall performance, albeit modestly.

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