Dictionaries and Thesauruses

Dictionaries

Whether your students are using bilingual, semi-bilingual or monolingual learners dictionaries in paper or electronic form, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary reference tools available than was the case even ten years ago. It is not the intention of this section to advise on the use of dictionaries in the classroom, but rather to outline some of the features that electonic dictionaries include and to show how they have develope beyond the printed page.

Virtually of the major monolingual learners dictionaries are sold with a CD- ROM. These CD- ROMs often have some or all of these features :

• Searchability ( which is not alphabetically based )
• Audio recordings of the words, often in both british and american English
• Games and exercises
• Information on tipical errors
• The ability to bookmark and personalize
• Thesaurus functionality
• Corpus informed information on frequency.

Theasauruses

While electronic dictionaries can be used at all levels , it is worths bearing in mind , initially, that theasauruses armor suited to the intermediate and advanced levels then to the elementary or pre- intermediate levels , where much more languages is new to the learner.

Theasaurus can do wonders for writing project . it can encourage learners to be more adventurows in their creative writing at the sametime as helping them to analyse their output more critically.

Consordencers and corpuses for language analysis

A consordencer is similar to a search angine in many respects . essentially , it is small program that can examine large quantities of teks for paterns and occurances of particular words or phrases .