I am the only teacher I know who hates the use of dictionaries during class and I’m not talking about bilingual ones. I hate the use of any kind of dictionaries in class.
I understand that by using a dictionary students get more independent learners. They also get to deal with a variety of other words and thus increase their vocabulary. I just don’t like it when students do that in class.
I’ll let you know my reasons based on MY EXPERIENCE:
- Students get to dependent on them ;
- Students tend not to interpret a text they’re required to;
- Students waste precious minutes;
- Students lose their focus;
- Students don’t do the required activity;
- Students think the teacher doesn’t provide enough time for them to answer the exercise;
- Students don’t learn what they really should;
- Students look up words but don’t really get to learn their meaning.
I may have other reasons that just don’t come up right now.
Again explaining about MY EXPERIENCE, I jumped into the conclusions above several years ago when I realized at first that students weren’t able to answer simple grammar exercises just because they didn’t know the meaning of some words. Besides the amount of time spent, they couldn’t understand that what they really were supposed to focus their attention on were the grammar rules not the vocabulary.
At first I decided to assign exercises which contained only previously learned words. That would mean a large number of words (as I’ve been teaching Intermediate or Pre-Intermediate levels for around 5 years). Nevertheless I noticed that some students still had a dependency on dictionaries! Even worse: they would look up the same words on a regular basis.
When it came to text interpretation this situation would be worse. I generally assigned a text which students needed to scan, skim, analyze and do all sorts of activities to guide them through understanding the context but I always seemed to face the same nightmare: they wouldn’t understand unless they translated or looked up the meaning on a monolingual dictionary.
They can’t resist that temptation even on vocabulary exercises! Last week I assigned an exercise in which groups of 4 students were supposed to talk about the possible meanings of some adjectives for some minutes and only after that they would try to match them to the definitions printed on slips of paper. Some students wondered why they couldn’t look up the meanings! Well if they looked them up there wouldn’t be a vocabulary exercise!
As we’re still in the beginning of the semester, my “new” students still didn’t get “my style” even though I have already talked to them about the necessity of being more independent, so what’s “my style” like?
- I tell students to avoid using a bilingual dictionary for translating words from L2 to L1. They’re allowed to use a Portuguese to English dictionary (sometimes) but they should also look up the meaning of the entry they found in a monolingual dictionary;
- The activity above would take too long so students are guided to realize that trying to force their memories into remembering previously learned words is way better, or they could do that at home;
- What if students really don’t know a word? They’re allowed to ask me. They know “I’m not a dictionary”, but in the middle of a class discussion it’s weird to stop a conversation to check a dictionary. If they simply ask me this doesn’t take much time and they may go on discussing;
- I write down on the right side of the board that word and it’s meaning or synonym or even draw something.
- At some point in class I ask students to write down that word;
- During following classes I come up with short, simple and yet effective exercises to check students comprehension on those words;
- For reading comprehension exercises I have some “methods” to make them learn new words from writing a glossary on the board (not much attention given to words – we don’t “waste” time) to doing pre-reading exercises in which students are totally free to use their dictionaries;
- The previous “technique” tends to disappear during the semester as I encourage them little by little to focus more on interpretation rather than learning new words;
We follow a textbook course, so we get to have vocabulary exercises in the 16 units we study. Students are to understand at some point that assimilating through context is the key to do intensive reading and also the key to make me a happier teacher.
In fact I’m not the only teacher who doesn’t see the urgent need to use dictionaries. Here are some interesting websites that agree with me.
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