Examining English-Majored Students’ Performance and Attitudes towards ChatGPT and an Online Dictionary for Lookup

It is true that the recent boom of artificial intelligence (AI), together with generative AI, has substantially transformed language education in myriad facets. In this context, powerful AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing AI, or Gemini have become worthy competitors to dictionaries. Hence, the aims of this study were to (1) compare the performance of English-majored students in doing receptive and productive lexical tasks when using ChatGPT and online Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (OLD) as consultation tools and (2) investigate their attitudes towards these two tools in language learning. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 60 Vietnamese English-majored students at Saigon University to achieve these objectives, followed by a questionnaire. The results revealed that students with the assistance of OLD had higher mean scores than those with ChatGPT in the receptive tasks, while the opposite is true for the productive ones. In addition, ChatGPT contributed to noticeably higher improvement scores between the pre-test and post-test in both receptive and productive tasks. In addition, the students also showed positive attitudes towards these tools for their language learning. These findings can provide valuable insights into the current picture among language education, AI, and dictionaries.