Using bilingual dictionaries

Monolingual dictionaries for foreign-language learners tend to be unquestioningly regarded as better than bilingual dictionaries. In this article, I discuss whether this is in fact true. Monolingual dictionaries have serious disadvantages in many language-teaching situations: in particular, learners will often not know which word to look up; and, even when they do, the definitions in the foreign language may not help them very much. I argue that bilingual dictionaries are potentially more efficient and more motivating sources of information for language learners. However, new kinds of bilingual dictionaries are needed, and I outline the features that they should have.