Dictionary Skills

1 How to make it easier to find your way around

Tip 1 Explore the distribution of letters

It’s not always easy to find a word in the dictionary, but there are a number of things that are there to help your students. To familiarise students with the distribution of letters and to save them time and frustration when they look words up, you can do the following exercise.

Hold a dictionary in front of you so that all the class can see it. Open it, and ask them to guess which letter the book is open at. Try this a few times, then get them to do it in pairs.

You can also ask questions such as:

• What do you think the first word in the dictionary is?
• What is the last word?
• Which letter starts the most words in English?
• How many pages do you think it takes up in the dictionary?

This again helps them to locate more easily where they will find words.

Tip 2 Remind students of guide words

Students can often ignore the two guide words at the top of each dictionary page. It is worth pointing out to them that these words are there to tell them which is the first and which the last word on the page. Practise using the help these words offer with the following short exercises:

On the page lion to literally, which of the following words would you find?
liquid, literature, list, link, listen

Suggest two other words that should be on that page.

On the page sometime to soothe, which of the following words would not be there?
somehow, song, something, soon, sorry

When students are ready, ask them to compare their answers with the dictionary.

Tip 3 Scan a dictionary page

Getting students to scan a whole dictionary page for information helps them to find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently. It also encourages them to focus on one particular element of the page, an essential skill for using a dictionary for decoding activities. You can do the following exercise to practise this skill.

Look up page 181 in the dictionary and find the headwords for the following:

• a type of shop
• a word that is used in science
• a word that is a synonym for intentionally
• a word that has a menu

Tip 4 Practise working with long entries

Students find long entries difficult, so lexicographers build in features to help them. Most dictionaries now have menus or other short definitions to point you to the right meaning. To practise working with the menus, do the following exercise.

Get your students to turn to an entry such as take. Read aloud one of the short definitions and ask which sense number they should go to in order to find the full definition.

Give students five examples, and ask them what the short definition is for each of those examples. Then ask them what the fourth word of each full definition is.

2 Learn more about words with the dictionary

Tip 5 Focus on pronunciation

It’s important for students to understand the way pronunciation is shown in the dictionary. Practise using the phonetics symbols in a playful way. Here are a couple of exercises to show you what you can do in class.

Ask the class to work in teams and give each team three different words that they probably don’t know. Ask each team to choose a word and write the word in three phonetic spellings, two of which are incorrect. When they are ready, ask each team to say and write its word as if they all could be correct. The other teams try to deduce or guess the correct pronunciation without using the dictionary.

Do the same activity but this time ask the teams to find three stress patterns for their word. Ask students to find a word of three or more syllables. When they are ready, they write the word on the board, in normal spelling, and then say each of the three pronunciations aloud. The other teams try to guess which stress pattern is most probable, and check with their dictionaries.

Tip 6 Learn about phrases and idioms

Point out to students that words rarely appear in isolation and that dictionaries are a valuable source of phrases and idioms. Make sure that students know where these phrases and idioms are listed in an entry and encourage them to use them appropriately. You can practise with this exercise.

In the entry for the noun heart, find the following:

• a phrase that means ‘to decide that you want something very much’
• a phrase that means ‘to not want to do something because it seems cruel’
• a phrase that means ‘to upset someone very much, especially by showing them that you do not love them’

Tip 7 Explore phrasal verbs

Phrasal verbs are often difficult for students. They do not always realise how many different meanings they have. Look at an entry for a common verb (e.g. come, give), spend some time exploring it, ensuring that students discover in which part of the entry they can find phrasal verbs. Do the following exercise to help students practise finding the phrasal verb they are looking for.

Get students to look up the phrasal verbs for stand in their dictionaries and ask questions such as:

• How many different phrasal verbs does stand have?
• How many senses are there for stand for?
• Which sense of stand out means ‘to be much more impressive or important than others’?

Tip 8 Extend vocabulary through collocations

Corpora have allowed lexicographers to give a great deal of collocational information, which helps students to use the language in a natural way, making them easily understood by the people they talk to or write for. Many dictionaries show this information by printing the collocates in bold in an entry. The Macmillan Essential Dictionary also has separate boxes showing frequent collocations. Encourage students to use this information in their own writing. Do these activities to practise.

Ask students to work in pairs or groups and list common adjectives that occur with the noun opportunity, common verbs with the noun contract, and common adverbs with listen.

Ask students to open their dictionaries at the word conversation and find the four collocates that are listed in the entry and then to write four sentences using these.

Tip 9 Use the examples

The examples in modern dictionaries are taken from natural written or spoken English. Use these as your source for grammar or vocabulary work in the classroom. For example, take a frequent word you want your class to study, and find the examples that are given for each meaning of that word in the dictionary. Remove the word itself from the examples leaving a blank. Where there is more than one meaning, provide examples for each meaning, with the word itself taken out. Read or show the examples with blanks to the class and invite students to discuss them and guess the blank word, explaining their choice.

3 Using the extra information in the dictionary

Tip 10 Focus on frequent words

Most modern dictionaries provide extra information on aspects of English such as correct usage, common errors, synonyms, metaphors, differences between American and British English, and information on what the most frequent words are. Explore the dictionary drawing students’ attention to these types of information and create classroom activities around them. To focus on frequent word, you can do the following activities.

Choose the three words from the page prevailing to priest that are used the most frequently:
price, prey, previous, prevent, prickly

List two words that you think are marked as the most frequent ones on the page reach to read. Then check your answers in the dictionary.

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The tips above are based on ‘Classroom tips for improving dictionary skills – Training wordmasters’, published in ‘EL teaching tips’, ELGazette, December 2001

Tipsters: Adrian Underhill, author of the Macmillan English Dictionary Workbook and
Gwyneth Fox, Associate Editor of the Macmillan Dictionaries

Click here to find out more about using dictionaries in the classroom.