USE OF DICTIONARIES IN LEARNING ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES AT THE TERTIARY LEVEL FROM THE STUDENTS' PERSPECTIVE

The aim of this paper is to present one part of a research study that explored the use of general-purpose and technical dictionaries in learning English for specific purposes at the tertiary level in Serbia. The research was carried out in 2018 on a sample encompassing 705 students from all the faculties of the University of Novi Sad. It was realized by means of a questionnaire composed of 50 questions with a four-point Likert scale and 10 questions with answers on a two-point scale. Also, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 11 students. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS 20, and the interview data were analyzed utilizing content analysis. Our quantitative findings reveal that students mostly use digital dictionaries, followed by printed and monolingual ones, and finally dictionaries of technical terms. The same quantitative data indicate that students use dictionaries primarily to find out the meaning of a word or its spelling, while they do not understand the abbreviations for grammatical information and cannot evaluate the quality of a dictionary. The majority of them do not possess a technical dictionary. The qualitative data confirm that the respondents mostly use digital sources and tools (e.g., Google 'Translate) since such searches are consistently faster and offer single, ready-made answers. The findings suggest that a systematic training in dictionary use at all educational levels is necessary.