Innovation in Language Learning

Online dictionaries are among the most essential components in the language learning process. While retaining the best characteristics of the traditional dictionaries, such as completeness and correctness, they possess new properties – fast response and reversibility, which greatly helps users who seek lexical help.

Unlike traditional dictionaries, online ones emerge and change fast. Besides, their operation depends on traffic and system tune-up. This makes their characteristics volatile and they are usually unknown. The paper discusses properties of online dictionaries and states that their specifications should be studied and tested on a regular basis. When developing and delivering their courses the teachers have to identify what dictionary characteristics are essential for their specific goals and select dictionaries that suit those goals best.

The paper also suggests that further innovations in the online lexicography shall be sought, such as application of cognitive abilities of dictionaries and addition of adoptive properties to the dictionaries. Analysis of the interaction between students and dictionaries can reveal information on students’ knowledge and problem areas in their learning. This ability is viewed as cognitive features of online dictionaries and discussed in this paper as such. Examples show how inferences can be made based on user’s queries sent to the dictionary.

The exploitation of cognitive features opens opportunities for dictionary optimization. In response to user’s queries dictionaries produce large amount of data, leaving the job of finding the required translation in that data to the user. This takes considerable effort and time. Through analysis of user’s queries, the dictionary can make inferences regarding translations most appropriate to the context the user works with and put these translations on the top of the results list.

Data obtained through experiments and analysis support the theoretical provisions discussed in the paper.