The present paper describes an investigation into the use of dictionaries and the results of a survey which was carried out among 202 Polish university students of German as a foreign language. The main aims are, on the one hand, to find out the level of dictionary awareness and dictionary culture and, on the other hand, to investigate if students know the monolingual learner’s dictionaries of German and are able to use them effectively.

The present paper aims to investigate whether the selected monolingual dictionaries of German as a foreign language can be treated as bridges between cultures. First, we discuss the significance of culrure in foreign language teaching and in lexicography (with special reference to pedagogical lexicography), and then we analyse the front matter, the back matter as well as the middle matter of the seven reference works. As results from the analysis, only some dictionaries (LDaF, PBDaF) in fact provide the user with information on the culture of German-speaking countries. A fully-fledged assessment of the dictionaries, however, can only be arrived at following a more comprehensive study that would take into account other elements of lexicographic description, primarily definitions and illustrative examples.

In the present paper we describe the consecutive phases - the planning phase, the collection of material, the selection of data, and the construction and arrangement of entries - in the compilation of an English-Polish glossary of lexicographical terms, which is part of a larger dictionary project. In doing so, we address some of the issues that made the compilation procedure methodologically difficult. On theoretical grounds, the main dilemma was whether lexicographical or terminological principles should be followed, inasmuch as they result in conflicting features, i.e. different coverage, organisation and description of data. The most pertinent practical problem that we faced was, on the one hand, the variability of terms in English lexicographical discourse and, on the other one, the incompatibility of English and Polish terminological frameworks. For the glossary to be used successfully in text reception, we thus needed to determine the complex semantic relationships between intralingual terms and, even more importantly, the various levels of equivalence between interlingual terms. The issues discussed here have been illustrated with selected English-Polish contrastive material.