Das adäquate Benutzen von Wörterbüchern, (Übersetzungs)korpora und Paralleltexten als strategische Kompetenz

Reference tools play an important role in plurilingual, lifelong and autonomous foreign language learning. Empirical studies show that the Net generation does not use reference tools in an adequate way. They often look up single words in dictionaries and do not focus on word combinations as collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms. With regard to this, the author presents a case study in which two students had to summarize the content of a newspaper text (Italian) in their foreign language (German). One used a bilingual dictionary and the other one made use of a parallel text in German. The results demonstrate how fundamental it is to use a number of reference tools, to compare them and reflect on them, especially for word combinations and phraseological units.