General Trends and Future Fruitful Research Areas

Major benefits of using portable devices include their mobility and instant archiving or storage in history memos for future useful quick review. Web dictionaries like those organized at the author’s site, however, provide much more potential, as one can copy and paste between any of over 2000 online lexicons organized there for over 500 language pairs. www.CALL4ALL.us provides a ‘‘Virtual Rosetta Stone,’’ not only of the full range of monolingual and multilingual web dictionaries, but also a vast language education links library for studying most of these languages as well.

Another main advantage of modern translation technology is that it is much more efficient. One saves a lot of time, as there is no more turning of book pages and searching for words endlessly. Words you are looking for are at your fingertips, just one click away. Each online dictionary has 400,000 entries, for example, in the case of Ectaco programs, and far more are freely available from web dictionaries organized at www.CALL4ALL.us’s dictionaries page athttp://www.call4all.us///home/_all.php?fi=d.

Recommendations for integrating the use of web dictionaries with language learning programs online are given in Loucky (32). The 10 types of sites are organized to help teachers and students more efficiently combine the benefits of electronic and online dictionaries with CALL websites to produce more effective and enjoyable content and language learning lessons.

The general trends over the past 10 years have been for PEDs to become more prevalent because of their speedy access to language meanings, grammar data, collocations/ corpus examples, compact size, improved features, and convenience of use as well as economical pricing. Some feature as many as 32 lexicons or more, pronunciation support, Internet connectivity, review games, automatic history of searches for review, and so on.

Translation software and CD-ROM dictionaries, being more expensive and limited to the location of one’s PC, have not become as popular. Web and phone dictionaries appear to be the ‘‘tool of choice’’ of most students, as these functions are often provided at their schools or included in their cell phone services at little or no extra charge. Assistive reading pens made by Quickionary also offer promise to those who can afford them.

They also seem to enhance learners’ interest and motivation levels, and thus help to contribute to higher levels of vocabulary retention, although how to best do so online is a major question in need of further study. Some of the most promising online glossing programs being tested now can be recommended for further research in this area: 1) Wordchamp.com, 2) Rikai.com, 3) Wordsurfing.- com, and 4) Babelfish.com.