Dictionaries and theasauruses

Dictionaries and theasauruses

• Dictionaries

Here we will be focusing on monolingual dictionaries. You may well have the experience of students bringing into class small hand-held electronic dictionaries. The one thing we would say about these hand – held electronic dictionaries is that their content is often inaccurate and that, if you can, you should advise your students on the range of products before they purchase, as you probably have done in the past paper dictionaries .

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 personalise

·         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 .

When working with concordancing we have the option to download and install both a concordancing program and a variety of corpuses ( often called corpora in the formal or technical literature) to our own computers, or use an existing website which queriesncorpuses online.

Corpuses

When choosing a concordancer, the main evaluation criterion, apart from the price and ease of use of the software, will be the type of language you want to work with: spoken or written, American or Brithish English, legal or journalistic, and so on.

Whatever approach you adopt, make sure that the corpus fits what you are teaching , test the concordance results beforehand so that you are not caught unawares by the results your learners may get , and ensure that they confortable with the tool and the technology, itself. For more freely-available web-based concordencers, try the following sites:

·         British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/), limit of 50 results.

·         Bank of English (http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx), limit of 40 results.

Translators for language analysis

Translation software is  still in its infancy and at the same time of writing remains unreable and in many instances of dubious quality. However, it is worth mentioning, if only to point out to your learners the dengers it poses if they use it inappropriately, for example to carry out a translation assignment into their own language.

Encyclopedias for reserch and project work

It used to case that having access to an encyclopedia meant also needing to have a large set of shelves on which to store all of the volumes. This collection of volumes then became a small CD-ROM sitting next to our computers, and these days is more likely to be a collection of web addresses to useful and authoritative sources online. Informational reference sides based on printed material are a good starting point and here we would include paper- based volumes such as the encyclopedia britannica , as well as microsoft encarta , which wash originally published on CD-ROM