Generally, bilingual dictionaries are not prioritized in foreign language courses. This is one of the reasons for the prevalence of inappropriate expressions in student products, another being students' lack of awareness of the polysemy relationship between the two languages. The aim of this classroom research is to determine how the English equivalents of Turkish polysemous words are selected when using a bilingual dictionary. In this sequential exploratory mixed methods research, 100 university students were assigned meaning determination tasks that required them to select the appropriate sense from the dictionary entry while translating Turkish sentences into English. Afterwards, they answered an instant retrospective questionnaire consisting of questions about how they selected the words. The results were examined through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The findings indicate that Turkish-English dictionaries, particularly those available online, are commonly used by the students. The most frequent strategy was to select the word that appropriately conveyed the meaning of the Turkish sentence. Additionally, it was established that low-level students frequently used the strategies of selecting the first word and selecting an unknown word, and that they had a greater need for training in the use of bilingual dictionaries.

Keywords: polysemy, bilingual dictionary usage, meaning determination