The Dreaded "D" Word

Dictionaries have always been part of the language classroom – even if only as background props used by teachers and students when an unknown word crops up. However, despite their usefulness, they are seldom allowed to take center stage.

For many teachers and students, the idea of using monolingual learners’ dictionaries to supplement the staple diet of every class sounds unappealing. This is partly due to teachers’ ignorance of the strategies they can employ to help their learners build dictionary skills and partly due to students’ lack of ability to use dictionaries appropriately.

In this post, we will consider some of the reasons teachers should integrate dictionary work into their classes, and take a look at some possible class activities.

Why should we use dictionaries?

Dictionaries provide not only definitions of words, but also phonemic transcriptions. These are especially useful given the confusing nature of English spelling, which often

misleads us as to how words should be pronounced (consider, for instance, though, trough and thought).

Another reason is that by reading through the example sentences illustrating how words are commonly used, students are exposed to natural-sounding ways of using new input, to words and phrases that usually co-occur with the headword, and to the grammatical patterns a word can take. An interesting side-effect of this is that users can acquire the ability to self-correct once they realize how much potential there is to be exploited in dictionary examples.

In addition, building dictionary skills leads students towards autonomy, thereby giving them the chance to work independently, especially in situations where this is crucial (e.g. when writing a business email to a foreign colleague).

Teachers often forget that one’s first encounter with a monolingual dictionary can be very daunting and that learners may need time to become comfortable with definitions written in the target language. However, integrating continual dictionary work into your classes should help your students overcome their initial reservations.

Ideas for using dictionaries

1 Elicit the meanings and pronunciation of new words from the students. When no one can provide these, have one or two students look up the words in the dictionary. Encourage them to help each other with phonemic transcriptions. Point out the example sentences and how the students can use them as a way of increasing their access to how words are used – by learning collocates, grammatical patterns, etc.

2 Before a test, or after the students have worked intensively on a unit or two, split the class into small groups. Have each group pick out a few words from each unit and look up how they’re transcribed phonemically. They then give these transcriptions to the other groups, who must write the words in ordinary spelling.

Note: Tell the students which pages of the coursebook each group will cover so that they don’t pick out the same words. Extend this activity by having the students work on meaning and collocations, too.

3 Give the students definitions of new words on small cards and ask them to work out what words are being defined. Then hand out cards with example sentences of the words and get the students to match the sentences to the definitions.

4 Write a couple of new words in phonemic script on the board. Split the class into two groups and get them to take turns trying to guess how the words are pronounced. Award a point for each correct answer.

5 Prepare a quiz with mistakes your students have made, e.g. incorrect use of dependent prepositions, awkward collocations, etc. Using dictionaries, the students work together to correct the errors.

6 Prepare a quiz with useful collocations which you think your students might not know. Gap example sentences from the dictionary, leaving only the headword. Students then have to look up the headwords to find out what the collocations are, e.g.:

Managers are __________ aware of the need to provide new staff with appropriate support. (Answer: acutely aware)

7 When students are confused about a pair of words, ask them to look both words up in the dictionary and find the difference between them. This works with words which have similar meanings (e.g. say and tell), those that students have difficulty pronouncing accurately (e.g. ship and sheep) and those that are pronounced the same (e.g. won and one).

8 Split the class into two teams. Explain that you will dictate some words, but that you will also mispronounce some of them. If the students are not sure whether a word was pronounced correctly or not, they look it up in the dictionary. Points are awarded for each (first) correct answer.

9 Tell the students that you are going to dictate a number of sentences, but you will hum some words in each sentence. (Make sure all the words you hum are the same part of speech, i.e. all prepositions, verbs, nouns, etc.) The students write down the complete sentences, including the missing words. They then check their answers in pairs, by looking up the appropriate dictionary entries.

Note: Students are often not aware of how to learn how to use prepositions accurately. This can be a useful strategy to help them understand that they can use a dictionary whenever they are not sure which preposition to use.

10 To teach students how to make their writing more “colorful”, pick out some sentences from their essays that make little use of interesting adjectives or adverbs. Get them to work together, using dictionaries, to make their writing more vivid by adding adjective + noun, adverb + adjective or adverb + verb couplings. For example, they can rewrite The girl was beautiful as The girl was remarkably beautiful.

Many teachers and students do not feel comfortable using dictionaries, and for this reason many of the activities proposed here aim at building dictionary skills without necessarily making use of dictionaries proper. However, it is my firm belief that students should be told about the important role dictionaries can play in their learning process. By gradually introducing our students to dictionary skill-building tasks such as these, we can make them feel more at ease with the dreaded “d” word – as well as making the task much lighter and more appealing to everyone involved.

Online resources:

Learners’ dictionaries

www.dictionary.cambridge.org

www.ldoceonline.com

www.oup.com/elt/oald

www.macmillandictionary.com

www.mycobuild.com

ELTChat summary on how to integrate dictionary work into classes

http://eltchat.org/wordpress/summary/how-to-integrate-dictionary-work-into-lessons-an-eltchat-summary-18072012/

* This post was originally published in issue 80 of English Teaching Professional.

Reading Recommendations for English Teachers

Dear teachers,

I strongly recommend two articles I've recently read in the Times. One is about how British English is more and more present in conversations in the USA. Very funny and, after all, pertinent to our discussions regarding whose English we speak after all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/fashion/americans-are-barmy-over-britishisms.html?pagewanted=all

 

The other article refers to teachers' evaluations in the USA and how this issue has gained importance lately.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/opinion/want-to-ruin-teaching-give-ratings.html

Hope you enjoy them!

Jeremy Harmer Says it All

Our CTJ teachers asked; Jeremy Harmer, our inspired and inspiring ELT guest of the month, gave educators some food for thought on various topics related to our field, igniting our professional minds to go above and beyond.

Hello Dani. I am so pleased you picked up on the ‘door out’ way of thinking about ending lessons. Apart from the ones I mentioned, we might want to select a student and ask him or her to summarise what has happened; we might give a period of quiet where students sit and think about the lessons and then individual students can say anything they want about what ahs happened in the lesson; we might want to end with a fantastic video or song; we might end by telling a story which encourages them to look forward to the next lesson; we might want to….. the list is endless. The most important thing, it seems to me, is to think carefully about how we end lessons and then vary the ways we do it. Surprise!

Hi Carlos! There are so many of them. A teacher at school who believed in me and let me do amazing things that I wouldn’t have believed possible. A lecturer at university who understood how to inform but also entertain – and who looked as if he loved what he was doing. Now? People I read and listen to – my generation includes people like Scott Thornbury who always enlightens and challenges me  - but also a whole tribe of new teachers and writers from Brazil (I met many of them at BRAZTESOL and CJT) and other countries who are ‘pushing the boundaries’, challenging us all, have great energy, new ideas and fresh eyes. I am so lucky to live, partly, in their world! To learn from people all we have to do, I think is open our ears and our eyes and start by saying ‘how can I make this work for me?’ rather than ‘That’s never going to work in my situation!!!

I remember one teacher standing outside the classroom and throwing in an orange, a book and something else. I can’t remember what the point of this was, but it got the students’ attention! How to start a lesson, Selma? Well there are all sorts of warmers and ice breakers, fund things to do. A story, a game a poem, an information gap activity to lead into the next stage of the lesson. But I think we need to vary the way we start lessons so that students have something to look forward to or be curious about. Sometimes, for example, we will start a lesson in a more formal way, explaining what we are going to do, or giving information. Sometimes we may go straight into a teaching sequence. But sometimes we will do something completely unexpected. Starting lessons – like ending a lesson (see above) – needs to live somewhere between comforting predictability and unsettling craziness. I guess it depends on you and the students.

You know what, Patricia, my greatest challenge was once when I went to Paris (which is very close to London of course) to speak to French College teachers (secondary teachers). They didn’t react like anyone else ever and to be honest I don’t think my talk was a great success! What I learned? First, try to know more about who you will be with and think how to work with them in an appropriate way; and secondly, culture does matter, and all teaching and learning takes place in a setting which is more socially constructed than linguistically focused.

I think it helps, Thiago, if you love doing it! I love working with teachers. Secondly (and I’m sure about this, having watched so many teachers with students and presenters etc), it’s all about passion in a way. If a speaker or teacher has a passion for what they do (or at least looks as if they have a passion) it is difficult to resist them! As far as a connection is concerned – well people are just so interesting. Listen, watch, enjoy – and the connection is there straight away!

Originally, Vinicius, I didn’t have a great desire to be a teacher really. I wanted to be a musician, but I wasn’t good enough :-( But then someone said I could do a short course about teaching and then I could get a job, maybe in some other country, so I thought I’d try that. I was incredibly fortunate to find, before that first training course had ended, that I really enjoyed it, and that the rewards for me, as a teacher, were likely to be far greater than the negative points. I was inspired by my trainers – and by the teachers at school who had believed in me and encouraged me.

Hello Rick…yes I have been coming to Brazil for years. How quickly time passes…But coming to Brazil has been an ongoing and repeated joy for me.

What’s changed? Well in Brazil there’s a confidence and an expertise in the language teaching profession which is stronger and more exciting than it has ever been – at least if the people I meet on my visits are anything to go by. There’s an enthusiasm and creativity among the younger teachers that is incredibly exciting. Part of this is a desire to examine things in a new way and not accept things just because they are ‘there’. Of course part of that is driven by the new technologies that have become part of our educational life. But it’s more than that. It’s a desire to constantly question and interrogate what we do. That’s what keeps even older teachers young, I think, and what makes it all worth doing.

That’s a really interesting question, Clarissa, especially since our students now live in a world where information about almost anything is instantly available on the Internet, for example. The challenge is to make coursebooks relevant in that reality, and really useful. So what we have to do is find ways to train students to learn, to suggest where they can go next in their learning, and create material that will help teachers make sense of the chaotic world of learning and teaching.

My first reaction to your question, Lilian, is to say that a good teacher can (or should be able to) teach well with nothing but a stick in the desert. However, we live in a world in which information technology informs everything we do, one way or another. And so it would be crazy to ignore that in the socially constructed world of the classroom. And anyway, technology enhances the learning experience of learning, can make things more ‘current’ and more ‘real’ – and a lot of English use, which students need to be comfortable with, around the world is digitally delivered. We are so lucky to live and teach in the age we do. But (and, to use an old cliché, it’s a big but) I have a default question I always ask about technology (or any other teaching innovation) and it is: ‘why is X the best way to do this?’ If we can’t answer that question satisfactorily then we should use a way that IS better, even if it doesn’t use technology. Best analogy? The blackboard. Innovative technology, I bet, when it first appeared. Now indispensable! But finally: ‘Ask not what we can do for technology, but what technology can do for us!’

I’m glad you were at that session in IATEFL, Alba. I enjoyed doing it. I think my point then was (and still is) that we don’t quite know the best ways to correct people – especially when you consider that language learners are individuals and each one may respond differently, and benefit from different correction techniques.

But I think we DO know that heavy correction during a fluency activity sort of ruins the point of the activity – although helping students with a more ‘gentle’ variety is almost certainly helpful for some.

I like the approach that my brother took when he was teaching at the Wimbledon School of English. He did a questionnaire and asked all the students how they wanted to be corrected – because he was worried that he only ever used reformulation, and he wasn’t sure if it worked (neither am I! Do students REALLY hear the difference between what they say and what we say?) When he got the results he could then correct in the way the students said they wanted to be corrected – although interestingly they realized that wasn’t quite what they wanted once they’d experienced it. So then he changed again. What I like is that he consulted the students as experts in their own learning, and the dialogue he had with them was useful and productive. 

Hi Inez! I think the job of a coursebook writer is to provide clear engaging material that will help teachers and students to learn. The progression needs to be clear, the instruction rubrics have to be transparent, and both teacher and students need to see the point of what they are being asked to do.

Of course we try and come up with enjoyable and interesting topics too, but that depends so much on who the teachers and students are. It’s up to teachers to make what the coursebook writer has provided alive and enjoyable. So how to ‘give the teacher a voice’? Maybe by not putting too much in the book; maybe by leaving metaphorical spaces between exercises. Maybe by providing lots of suggestions for what can be done; maybe by offering alternatives at various points; maybe by suggesting how students and teachers can follow up topics and language material.

Thanks for your kind words about that plenary in July. I loved being at the CTJ. Lovely place!