Dictionary Activities
And that is
C. Leaney
Cambridge University Press 2007, 150 pp., 17.20
isbn 978 0521 690409
This is another book in the excellent Cambridge
Handbooks for Language Teachers series edited by
Scott Thornbury. It is full of practical, useful, and
generally engaging activities to help students get the
most out of their dictionaries. Teachers who already
do dictionary training with classes will find new ideas
and many interesting variants on familiar themes. For
those teachers new to dictionary training, this is
a great place to start. The ideas in this book provide
good coverage of all the main aspects of basic
dictionary training and focus on all the key features
that students need help with.
As the useful introduction to this book says, learner
dictionaries are getting better and better all the time.
They contain more information and have clearer
layouts, in theory making them easier to use.
However, in the main students still benefit from
guidance in how to use dictionaries effectively.
Teachers, likewise, benefit from a repertoire of
activities that will provide their classes with some
dictionary training to familiarize their learners with
dictionaries so they become more confident users
and ultimately more independent learners of English.
It is surprising that there are so few books for teachers
or students that offer anything in the way of dictionary
training. Many students still find it hard to find the
word or the meaning they are looking for, or, when
they do locate what they want, they cannot
understand how to use or pronounce the word,
orequally importantlywhen not to use it. This can
add up to a great waste of time, and many lost
learning opportunities. What is more, for many, the
need to turn to a dictionary for help is in itself
a reminder of their limitations, and this can create an
inbuilt sense of frustration that militates against
positive exploitation of all the resources a dictionary
has to offer. In modern communicative classrooms in
particular, with their emphasis on pair and group
work, dynamic activities, productive activities, and
fun, the dictionary can easily seem to depart from the
prevailing communicative ethos. Students do not
generally communicate while consulting
dictionariesand all too often communicate poorly
with what they find in dictionaries. That is partly why
many teachers tend to relegate dictionary use to
homework. Using dictionaries is not generally much
fun. But it can be: there is no reason why dictionaries
88 Reviews
cannot be used communicatively in class.
precisely where this book comes in.
There are about 100 activities, divided into eight
unequal sections that can be dipped into to suit the
needs and interests of the group. Many are just 5 to 15
minutes long, so can be incorporated with ease into
lessons as introductions, fillers, quick transition
activities, and so on. This is ideal, as it allows teachers
to use these awareness-raising activities in line with
the current mantra that training should be little and
often. The ideas in the Quick activities section are
brilliant for this. Others are more substantial and
could be expanded into whole lessons themselves.
Many of the activities are generic activity types rather
than one-off exercises, so they can be used several
times with the same students by changing the input.
All can be adapted, simplified, or made more complex
with relative ease. This will help teachers to make the
activities a regular part of their classroom repertoire.
The first section deals with confidence and skill-
building activities, which is a good place to start for
anyone who has never attempted any awareness-
raising activities or dictionary skill work in class.
Further sections cover vocabulary building, grammar,
pronunciation, and reading and writing activities
dealt with together. Then follow three rather random
sections on quick activities, a section with nine
activities for C D - R O M and electronic dictionaries,
and a final section called Specialized dictionaries.
This latter seems rather tacked on as it offers just one
or two activities each relating to bilingual
dictionaries, bilingual production dictionaries,
picture dictionaries, phrasal verb dictionaries, and
dictionaries of idioms, where each would actually
merit a whole section on its own (but to be fair there is
a degree of cross-referencing throughout the book
indicating activities elsewhere in the book that could
be used with different sorts of dictionaries).
In the first section, activities reinforce basic alphabet
skills and help students become familiar with the
content and layout of entries. There is work on
spellchecking, example sentences, understanding
the pragmatic information given with entries, and
so on. This is extremely useful and is the basis for
accurate and effective use of dictionaries of all types.
That is why it is a pity that there is little below lower-
intermediate level, where such training is really
needed as it will stand students in good stead for later
study. Also, it was surprising to find spellchecks for
unlikely errors, with students invited to check the
correct spellings and choose between
communicasion/communication rather than
targeting the perennial and predictable problem of
the double m, and likewise uncomfortible/
uncomfortable rather than the ubiquitous error
unconfortable. Teachers must be sensitive in using
these activitiessome students might find it
frustrating that the activities here rarely involve the
meaning of the words, surely one of the biggest
problems for learners.
With 20 activities, the section on Vocabulary-
building is quite properly the largest. It begins with
some all-important guidance about how to record
vocabulary in lexical sets, by word families and by
putting related words on a scale. There are useful
activities promoting awareness of collocation and
word building, which include work on prefix
meanings, compound forms, and more. However,
these are again aimed at intermediate level students
and above although these are areas that would be of
direct usefulness and might well save a great deal of
time and speed up learning if introduced at lower
levels.
Not all the activities are original: the old chestnut call
my bluff is here as definitions bluff, where students
present three or four competing definitions for an
item in the aim of misleading their opposing team
into choosing the wrong meaning. Quite apart from
the possibilities for confusion and mislearning
inherent in the game, it strikes me that this is of rather
dubious benefit since most of the creative input is
concerned with trying to distract learners from the
real definition of a word. More effort goes into coining
false definitions, which always outnumber the real
meaning of the item.
The grammar activities focus on the codes that
explain the grammar patterns. This is essential if
dictionaries are to help students productive English:
if students understand the codes, they can in theory
use a word with the correct grammar patterns despite
never having studied the word before. Here, there are
several good activities on countable and uncountable
nouns and related quantifiers, plus work on infinitive
or -ing forms, dependent prepositions, and
transitive and intransitive verbs. Again, there is little
explicitly aimed at elementary level, where good
habits need to be encouraged. It is good to see that,
as elsewhere in the book, activities offer a variety of
outcomes and range beyond simple gap-
fillingthough there is plenty of that here, too.
Dictionaries contain a wealth of phonological
information that can help students not only
understand but also pronounce new items
comprehensibly. The pronunciation section has
activities that focus on stress patterns, homophones,
rhyme sounds, and minimal pairs, among others.
There is a good mix of old and new. The old favourite
Reviews
tongue twisters is here, and so is a very interesting
activity on cockney rhyming slang. It is appropriate in
a work like this that there is no direct training in
phonemic transcription, as that could fill a book in its
own right. A number of the activities focus on
individual sounds and this will encourage students to
make sense of transcription conventions.
The activities in the reading and writing section are
divided between decoding and encoding activities,
the latter being most suited to production
dictionaries like the Longman Activator. Particularly
interesting for more advanced students is the work on
discourse markers, and there are also nice activities
on confusables like affect/effect, remember/
remind, along with work on levels of formality, and
deducing meaning from context. The activity on
punctuation, though obviously useful, will only work
as a dictionary exercise where dictionaries have study
pages on punctuation, which is not yet always the
case. While the productive ideas are very useful and
certainly enjoyable, it is a pity not to find more
activities that encourage similar degrees of
production based on normal learner dictionaries, as
these are also intended to be used productively.
At the end of the book, the list of resources mentions
some useful websites, including concordancers
and corpora. The index is exhaustivebut a final
gripethe print is so tiny that it is a good test of
eyesight!
The reviewer
Jon Wright is a teacher, teacher trainer, and materials
writer with over 20 years experience. He has written
a number of EF L publications, including Idioms
Organiser, and in the Oxford Resource Books for
Teachers series Dictionaries. He co-wrote the Cobuild
Elementary English Grammar with Dave Willis. He is
now writing a series of coursebooks for the German
market. Current interests include developing training
programmes for content language integrated learning
(CLIL) projects, writing online learning materials
for teachers, and producing IELTS (International
English Language Testing System) materials.
Email: jon.wright@live.co.uk
doi:10.1093/elt/ccn066
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