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This paper examines two kinds of questions relating to the lexical needs of professional ESP students:(1) what range of terms and words do they need help with?(2) what types of dictionary, bilingual and/or monolingual, can they make use of in solving lexical problems?The empirical data used in this study came from an in-class assignment with Spanish postgraduate students of architecture, showing that their lexical searches were less often for architectural terminology per se than for the shared terminology of science disciplines and academic discourse at large. In individual case studies, ESP students grappled with the special architectural senses of common English words, but were able to decode them with the help of both bilingual Spanish-English dictionaries and monolingual (English) dictio-naries, general and specializedwhatever their L2 proficiency level. This finding runs counter to the commonly held belief that only advanced students are able to make use of monolingual (L2) dictionaries. Working with different types of dictionary engaged the students in critical lexicography, and in synthesizing lexical material from multiple sources to satisfy their lexical needs. Such training makes for independent language learning, pre-paring students for the bilingual or multilingual workplace.

Backchannels are a linguistic phenomenon that remains poorly defined. Borrowing of terminology and a reliance on axiomatic definitions has resulted in a diverse nomenclature and an indeterminate inventory of forms. Further, research concentration on backchannels produced in northern hemisphere English has led to the assumption of a common repertoire across all varieties, without supporting empirical investigation. This investigation analysed transcriptions of telephone conversations drawn from the Australian and New Zealand sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English (ICE), and used the ICE corpus mark-up scheme to select potential targets. Chi-square analyses found listeners used single word backchannels more often than more elaborate forms; and Australian listeners produced more backchannels and more single forms. These findings were compared with reported usage by US English listeners, showing that while listeners worldwide draw from a common repertoire of backchannel forms, they differ in the complexity of the structures they use.