Week 8

WEEK 8: HOW TO USE DICTIONARIES TO LEARN VOCABULARY IN A BETTER WAY

Tuesday, March 9^th, 2017

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This week I read the articles “Online English-English Learner Dictionaries Boost Word Learning and Using Technology to Assist in Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension” in order to analyze the importance of integrating online dictionaries in the classroom to make students to create their own vocabulary.

Something I want to remember from this article are some the suggestions this article offer teachers to help students to learn English.

1). Corpus-based dictionaries which means the content is based on real-world spoken and written discourse when words, definitions, and examples are selected and organized. In other words, it helps learners of English to focus first on frequent words and meanings by comparing the meaning from different resources to proceed to memorize more words and their meanings. 2). Word frequency. This refers to know how frequently words are used in overall written and spoken discourse. It is very helpful information to English learners so that their can verify what words should be learned first. 3). Collocations refers to words combinations that typically go together with the words. Students easily can look for a word on whether online dictionaries or printed version to identify if that word can be together with others to make other meaning or going deeper and find colocation mistakes of that word.

4). Authentic examples. Students can discover the meaning of words but it is essential to have a dictionary that provides how to use words in real context. With this extra effort students fully acquire those words, the meaning and its use in real context to be applied later. 5). Topical vocabulary indicates how the words relate semantically to different categories. Also students can have synonyms and semantic webs to indicate different word usages and to illustrate how a single word relates to different concepts.

My favorite quote from this article was “good readers have a rich vocabulary, and similarly, a rich vocabulary is one of the key elements that ensure reading proficiency” with the suggestions before, teachers can enhance students reading skills and at the same time teaching a useful technique to enrich their vocabulary in an efficiently way.