Language for Life

“The dictionary is an essential resource for supporting literacy learning in areas of reading, writing, spelling and word knowledge. Unlike Google, the use of dictionaries develops students’ awareness of alphabetical order, word meanings, origins and structure. I find students especially enjoy working with dictionaries in my classroom and taking part in the navigation/research process for themselves. I find that when I do allow students on Google to find word definitions or to source correct spellings of words that it takes them a much greater time to do this!!
I always have at least three to four different dictionaries around the class to support students’ independent research.”

– Primary school teacher in response to online survey

Your video on dictionaries, then morphology

https://vimeo.com/1014118568/a695de2db2?share=copy

Are paper dictionaries obsolete? With sophisticated search engines and online dictionaries in our lives, there are certainly grounds for arguments in the affirmative.

My conclusion is twofold:

  • At the time of writing, paper dictionaries were still very much present in classrooms.
  • Both online and paper dictionaries are organised in the same basic way.

Therefore, learning the parts of a dictionary, and how to use reference materials in general, is still a valuable skill. Furthermore, a large majority of the teachers surveyed at my workshops over the past several years admit to not knowing the full extent of the information provided and conventions used by dictionaries. Their feedback is always positive in this regard, and they often report a renewed keenness to help their students get the most out of dictionaries.

In the following lessons, students will discover the various sections of a dictionary. They will find examples of these sections and will play games and do activities to familiarise themselves with dictionaries.

For these lessons, students will need to access a good dictionary, suitable for their grade level.

Webster’s and Oxford offer a wide range of student dictionaries and are my personal favourites. Living in Australia necessitates the use of the MacQuarie dictionary as well.

Even dictionaries don’t agree, so why should we?

When working through the dictionary activities in the course, you and your students will find a slight difference in classification, pronunciation, usage and definition of words from dictionary to dictionary. The point is, even dictionaries don’t agree.

In the Concise Oxford Dictionary the word lounge is defined as a verb, three nouns to do with the sense of a sitting room and one noun as an act of lounging.

The Webster’s Pocket dictionary gives it three verb and noun definitions apiece.

Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary Online has three senses of the verb and a whopping seven noun entries. The Australians have really taken to the word, giving it all kinds of uses. It shares the sofa/couch definition with the Webster’s, but only the Australians have managed to bring their love of lounges into a corruption of the French chaise longue with the very endearing chaise lounge. The Macquarie peevishly states:

“Usage: Although deprecated by some, the form chaise lounge has now achieved equal currency with chaise longue in Australian data.”

Bless them.

The point here is that, like our students and colleagues, even grand institutions do not agree on word usage. Some, like our students and colleagues regard themselves as something of an authority above all others (the Concise Oxford Tenth Edition states on its cover that it is “The foremost authority on current English”). Why would we expect our students and colleagues to act any differently?

Encourage and enjoy the arguments.

LESSON PLAN

  • Students work in pairs or threes. Each team needs to have a good paper dictionary on hand. There can be several different editions in one classroom.

Optional further study

A while ago, I recorded a video on learning the alphabet backwards. It’s interesting but not essential.

https://youtu.be/LI2f0RMoDQw

Language for Life Video Notes

  • At 53:40 we turn to etymology and look at Etymonline.
  •  At 1:02 we move to morphology.


Etymonline

Course Navigation

Lyn Stone

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