The use of mobile phone dictionaries: Students’ perspectives

Emil Li
Caritas Francis Hsu College
Hong Kong SAR, China

Mobile phones are now ubiquitous and mobile phone technology is capable of managing many personal needs beyond communication by offering services ranging from photography, video, calculation, game consoles and a music library to a personal diary, navigation tools, the Internet, a timepiece and a dictionary. 

This paper explores the dictionary function of mobile phones which seems to have gained considerable popularity and is particularly well received by students, despite the fact that many of them consider the explanations of words as too simple, and even at times ambiguous. The ultimate purpose of dictionaries is to satisfy the needs of their users and obviously much remains to be done to produce mobile-phone dictionaries of high accuracy and efficacy. For this purpose, a survey of tertiary students in colleges/universities in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China will be conducted to examine the needs of student mobile-phone users. The results will then be carefully analysed and interpreted, and it is hoped that the findings will be useful for the improvement and future design of mobile dictionaries.