This short paper suggest some ways in which
the teacher and student may use a pedagogical dictionary, such
as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, COBUILD or the Cambridge
International Dictionary of English, as a resource for language
learning complimenting its traditional role as a reference book.
Dictionaries are boring. They are just pages and pages of words - few people sit down to actually read a dictionary. We use them on a daily basis as a reference tool - doing that crossword, writing a letter, looking up a big word we don't understand (E.g. Sesquipedalaphobia - the fear of long words). We use the dictionary as a metacognitive tool - it is part of a strategy for problem solving. Therein lies the problem - as a problem-solving tool, we tend to ignore the wealth of other uses it can be put to. The dictionary only jumps to mind when there is a problem.
EFL students will often say "it takes too long to look up
a particular word" in a pedagogical dictionary, or "I
don't understand what the codes mean", or even "it gives
me too much information, it's a bit confusing". These are,
of course, the basic problems encountered by students when using
the pedagogical dictionary. Much more linguistic information is
contained in the learners' dictionary than in the normal monolingual
dictionary, or even the pocket bilingual dictionary. Even levels
of pragmatic information are substantially higher. It is no wonder
that students become confused.
The first step to be taken to resolve these
problems is a simple course in dictionary training. This does
not entail a marathon session in dictionary code breaking - indeed,
I would argue that this would be counter productive. The old maxim
of "little and often" seems appropriate. Regular sessions
of five or ten minutes seem to work best in the classroom situation.
The benefits are greatest when students learn to explore and befriend
the dictionary, rather than simply consult it. The codes used
from one dictionary to another vary quite substantially, so as
part of our class preparation we too could learn something, not
only about spelling and alternative spellings, but about phonetic
symbols, frequency of words in the English language and their
collocations.
We may find a certain contradiction arising for students. Current communicative teaching methods encourage guess-work and controlled risk taking strategies in order to preserve the communicative imperative; making mistakes is a natural, and potentially useful, part of language learning and is indicative of the processes in interlanguage. Isolated lexical mistakes rarely affect true communication, and in the classroom situation, we teachers now tend not to over-indulge in instant error correction, as significant mistakes can be investigated and corrected afterwards.
On the other hand, traditional dictionary consultation has been
widely regarded as a right or wrong issue, where the student is
expected to, and moreover, feels obliged to, always find the "right"
answer. Part of the trick in breaking the perception of the dictionary
simply as a reference tool, lies in demonstrating its use as a
resource where productive language can be fostered through getting
things wrong, in the traditional sense, as well as getting it
right.
Divide the class into 3 or 4 groups and give a dictionary to each group. Ask a volunteer to select a number between 1 and 1000. Whatever number they choose, ask the class to open their dictionaries on that page - and yes, dictionaries do have page numbers! Give the class about 10 minutes and ask them to think up mimes or charades to illustrate the headword on that page of the dictionary. The groups then take turns miming the words they have selected from the page in the dictionary. No doubt the groups will tend to choose the easier words to mime, but allow them to continue as each mime will be different and each word re-mimed will reinforce their learning.
Divide the class in to pairs. Ask each pair to pick a number between 1 and 26, praying they won't pick 24 or 26! Then ask the pairs to open the corresponding letter of the alphabet - and I'm sure you can take advantage of this little exercise too. Then ask them to negotiate what the 5 most useful words under that letter are. Each pair will then describe, define, mime or act out the words they have chosen and each of the other pairs will have two chances to guess what the letter the word being described begins with and then what the word is.
First, ask the students to skim their dictionaries
looking for words that they think you won't know. Give them 2
to 4 minutes for this activity and then get them to test your
spelling and ability to define the meaning of words. For each
of your mistakes or inability to define, the student gets a point.
In a perfect word the score should be nil!
Revenge time! Now ask your students to chose a letter of the alphabet.
Explain to them that they have 10 minutes before you test them
on the first 5 pages of that letter in the dictionary. When the
time is up, find the most useful words and the words most relevant
to what you have been covering with your class and, of course,
the words that they should already know. Then pose questions to
them along the lines of "Can you find a word that means...?"
After 30 seconds ask for suggestions, allowing them time to look
through their dictionaries. Then write the suggested word(s) on
the board - allow the students to negotiate the "best-fit"
if more than one word is suggested.
If you have comments or would like to add an exercise of your
own, e-mail me at ciaran@mindless.com