“Teaching dictionary Skills”

In a research paper I was working on recently, I highlighted the issue of not using and teaching dictionary skills in our Lebanese schools, as far as I have seen, not to be judgmental. I went through the importance of learning these skills, and how they will help in learning the target language. Below is a short description of the paper I wrote. 

Teaching vocabulary skills is one of the most important skills a language learner needs to adopt. It is an aid that we can always go back to whenever we are trapped, or not able to find a certain meaning to a word. However, do we know how much our students know the importance of it? Do we know how much they know how they should use it? In our classrooms, we tend to present words directly to our students; we either present them in context, in which the students induct the meanings through context clues, or we give them the meanings directly with each new term. We rarely see the use of dictionaries; in Lebanon, there are few who start teaching dictionary skills, and not until they reach higher levels. We even started to find the dictionary in the hands of our student’s not from long ago. When putting dictionaries in the hands of our students, we should teach them how a dictionary will help them develop new skills, raise awareness of the information they can find, and expose them to the different kinds of dictionaries.

Research has highly emphasized the importance of using a dictionary as a language-learning tool, and the fact that we have to provide our students with it, and teach them how it will help them develop new skills concerning their target language intake. In addition, to raise awareness of what it provides the learner with and teach them about the different types of dictionaries and how each type aids us in our learning process.

It is also important that students know when to use a dictionary, when it is acceptable and when is it less useful. Our role as teachers is to talk to them about it and highlight the importance of trying to find meanings out through clues before going back to a dictionary, because we can’t look up every single word, as I have mentioned previously, if it is that way we would spend our whole day holding a dictionary. Therefore, it is important that we make it clear to our students to know when it is appropriate to use a dictionary.