Teaching english students how to make a correct use of dictionaries

Abstract

Dictionaries have traditionally been an essential tool for language learners, and they are still considered a basic tool for those who are involved in the process of learning a foreign language. Traditionally, lexicography has focused on word meaning, but nowadays dictionary entries provide much more information that headwords’ definitions and they go beyond the field of semantics, providing other relevant types of information such as countability, phonetic transcriptions or collocations. Nonetheless, Chan (2014) explains how for different reasons, dictionary users do not make a correct use of dictionaries and, as consequence, they do not make the most out of them. A possible solution to this problem could be instructing language students to make a proper use of dictionaries. For this reason, the aim of this MA thesis is to design multiple activities that can be implemented in the English classroom in order to teach students to make a correct use of English dictionaries.