Learner dictionaries get better and better. They have more information and are easier to access and to understand than ever before. And, with the advent of electronic formats, space is no longer the problem it was.

There is a tremendous amount of information in a good learner's dictionary – sometimes an overwhelming amount. Helping students tap into that information efficiently is one of the best ways to help them become independent, lifelong language learners.

These activities are designed to foster good dictionary skills, help create good language learning habits and appeal to a variety of learning styles.

The activities are teacher-friendly and require little in the way of preparation or technology (apart from those that use the CD-ROM and some online activities) and can be adapted to a variety of language teaching contexts.

What makes learner dictionaries special?

The activities are based on the features of learner dictionaries that have become standard: clear definitions written using a graded defining vocabulary, frequency indicators, collocation information, navigational devices, example sentences, pronunciation, grammar and usage information.

When choosing a dictionary, it is worth taking the time to decide which features are most important to you and your students, and to evaluate how well designed the features are in each dictionary.

Defining vocabularies

One of the most distinctive differences between dictionaries written for native speakers of a language and learners of that language is that the definitions in learner dictionaries are written using a restricted defining vocabulary.

The importance of memory in learning a second language cannot be underestimated. Just think of how many words a student needs, for both recognition and production, in order to achieve even an intermediate level of English: current estimates put this figure at around 3,000. All of these words, at some time, have to be stored in the student's long term memory, and have to be available for immediate retrieval. But it's not just words that the student needs to commit to memory. Researchers are now convinced that fluency in speech and writing owes in large part to the learner's capacity to store, not just individual words, but lexical ‘chunks’. Chunks are groups of words that tend to occur together, either because they are common collocations, like fair hair, fair enough, fair and square, or because they are fixed formulaic utterances, like greetings (nice to meet you) and other speech acts (would you like a cup of tea?). These chunks are encountered, stored and retrieved as individual units. Some researchers estimate that proficient speakers have a memorised ‘bank’ of literally tens of thousands of these items.

Dialogues are an ideal way of providing learners with a rich diet of words and chunks in context, and in a format that allows easy and repeated practice. It follows, then, that there are good grounds for sometimes asking students to memorise them.

There are many factors which will influence how readily language items will be retained by students. Repetition is perhaps the most fundamental.