Tips for using the Essential CD-ROM

The following tips will give you ideas on how to use the Macmillan Essential Dictionary CD-ROM for language practice and extension. You can do these activities in the classroom if you have access to a computer or you can ask your students to do the activities at home or in a language lab.

We’ve put together a list of common problems teachers and students face and provided ideas for how to deal with these. If you have further questions or suggestions, please fill in the contact us form and send it to us.

The tips cover the following areas:

Tip 1 grammar

Tip 2 pronunciation

Tip 3 pronunciation and spelling

Problem: My students are very confused by adjectives that look like adverbs because they end in -ly. How can I find all these adjectives?

1. Click on SmartSearch

2. In the search box, type *ly

3. Tick Headwords

4. Tick Part of speech

5. Tick adjective

6. Press Go

• A list of the adjectives that end in -ly is displayed in the Search Results panel in the bottom left corner of the screen.

• If you would like to narrow your search to the most frequent of these adjectives, tick Frequency, then tick very high frequency, high frequency and quite high frequency. Finally, press Go.

Problem: My students have difficulty pronouncing the diphthong e. How can I find words containing this phoneme for pronunciation practice?

1. Click on Sound Search

2. In the Search for box, enter * and click on the symbol e. (Now you have *e appearing in the search box.)

3. Press Go

• A list of words will appear in the Search Results panel. All these words will end in the sound e. Select a few of these and practise their pronunciation with the class.

Problem: My students are bewildered by the illogical variations in English spelling. Can you suggest how the Essential CD could help me teach some of the differences between spelling and pronunciation?

Essential’s unique SoundSearch facility is ideal for teaching spelling, because it allows you to search for phonetic characters. You can use wildcards to find words that contain particular combinations of sounds. For example:

1. Click on SoundSearch

2. In the Search for box, delete any characters that have been inserted automatically

3. Under Consonants, click on s

4. Under Vowels and diphthongs, click on a

5. Under Wildcards, click on *

6. Press Go

• A list of the words that begin with these sounds is displayed in the Search Results panel in the bottom left corner of the screen. This list includes cider, cycle, psychic, science, and sight.

• Any number of phonetic characters and wildcards can be combined in any position for infinitely flexible searching.

For a demonstration of the main features of the CD-ROM and for more tips on how to use the CD-ROM for studying and teaching, click here.