Abstract
Research about the use of electronic dictionaries to support the acquisition of collocations is growing rapidly. However, no study investigates how electronic dictionaries impact upon the acquisition or the judgement of the appropriateness of collocations. This study reports on a genuinely new empirical research of dictionary use to extract collocational information. It aims at gathering information on how dictionary users, native Arabic-speaking learners of English, handle dictionary information to form appropriate collocations; users are required to provide items instead of the etc used in verb definitions to stand for the nouns used with the defined verb. Two tests were used with Arab MA students majoring in English and these demonstrated that dictionary use would improve users’ collocational knowledge, particularly when identifying erroneous collocates.
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