Dictionary learning has been applied to face recognition and gets good results. However few works applied dictionary learning in facial expression recognition. This paper investigates the application of K-SVD in facial expression recognition. Since K-SVD focuses on reconstruction and lacks discriminant capability. It has similar classification performance with image pixel values. To address this problem, this paper proposes a Combined Dictionary Scheme, which uses combination of separate dictionaries. This yields better performance than the original single dictionary scheme in terms of both recognition rate and computation complexity.