Didactic potential of bilingual dictionaries

Abstract

Drawing on the example of the “Ukrainian-Croatian and Croatian-Ukrainian Practical Dictionary” by A. Menats and R. Trostynska (published in Croatia in 2025), this article examines the impact of bilingual dictionaries on developing the communicative competence of international students learning Ukrainian.

Teaching aids are a cornerstone of an effective educational process. However, an analysis of research into traditional methods of teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language reveals a gap: although dictionaries serve multiple functions ‒ including didactic ones ‒ most methodologists and scholars overlook them as potent instructional tools. Consequently, the role of bilingual dictionaries within the foreign language teaching system remains poorly defined.

The authors analyze the dictionaryʼs lexical corpus, entry structure, grammatical and stylistic coding, selection principles for translation equivalents, and contextual examples, with a particular focus on high-frequency idioms. The study concludes that a bilingual dictionary efficiently supports the linguistic, speech, sociocultural, translational, and professional dimensions of training for students learning Ukrainian. Integrating this type of dictionary into the curriculum can significantly enhance all forms of speech activity and foster communicative competence. To leverage the dictionary effectively, a dedicated system of tasks must be developed to unlock its comprehensive data and maximize language proficiency. Since the lexical system of Ukrainian is complex and dynamic, future research should explore how bilingual dictionaries can aid foreign users in structuring, expanding, and actively replenishing their vocabulary through independent study.