Benefits of online dictionaries when teaching English

How often do your students use dictionaries when learning English? Do they use online or paper dictionaries? 

Are you sure they use monolingual dictionaries or just Google Translator or DeepL? Can they use dictionaries in full? 

To my surprise while teaching I found out my students don’t know how to use online dictionaries. 

So what I did was to show by my own example how to use them. 

As a result, my students started to select the words and use vocabulary in a more accurate way. 

So, I realized that it is a good idea to teach students how to use online dictionaries.  

Dictionaries present:

• meaning and form of the word
• pronunciation and spelling
• how words work in sentences
• word family
• collocations

Dictionaries explain a word using the easiest words or providing some situation: 

In addition to this, they show the form of the word: 

As you can see, ‘vegetation’ is an uncountable noun after which we need to use the singular form of the verb. 

This is a good thing to mention when presenting new vocabulary in the lesson.

When your students learn new words, they need to know which level they belong to, whether these words can be used in formal or informal situations and how often they are used, especially if your students are preparing for international exams like IELTS, CAE, CPE, etc.

In this case, C1 belongs to the advanced level, S1 means one of the 1000 most frequent words in Spoken English and W2 means one of the 2000 most frequent words in Written English.

My favorite questions from my students are about pronunciation and spelling. 

‘Why do you pronounce research instead of research? Or why do I have the word ‘analyse’ underlined?’ Dictionaries help in this, too. Teach students to distinguish British English from American English. 

The same is with spelling:

The difference between British English and American English is in using ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ or just in omitting the letter ‘u’.

For teachers, it sounds so obvious and clear, but students very often can’t even guess about it.

Dictionaries provide good examples of how to use the words correctly in the sentences. 

Here’s my favourite ‘surprising word’ — the verb ‘suggest’. 

With the help of the dictionary, my students discovered that after ‘suggest’ we need to use ‘that clause’ or gerund but not an infinitive with ‘to’:

Why I like using dictionaries when teaching is that they also show typical mistakes made by students:

This can be used when you want to provide some language feedback or you can easily use these sentences for controlled or semi-controlled practice.

Dictionaries are a good source to enlarge your vocabulary because they present synonyms, antonyms and all derived words. 

When clicking any of these words, you can get information about the needed word: meaning, part of speech, pronunciation and how to use it in the sentences.

When teaching English I draw my students’ attention to the word ‘neighbours’ with the word we learn. 

Collocations are always presented in dictionaries, so check them out:

Do I use only one dictionary when teaching English? No. 

I always compare definitions and search for the easiest one. 

Dictionaries always help me to present some new vocabulary in the lesson. 

Do I believe it’s a good idea to teach students how to use online dictionaries? Yes. 

By improving this skill, they will find out many useful facts about the words and how to use them correctly while being out of the classroom.