Job Discussion Forums

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Deconstructor]

Using electronic dictionaries or any other bilingual ones is an absolute copout on the students' part. They always believe that language learning is basically translation from their language to English. This is the reason why a vast majority of students are stuck on intermediate 1, and shall forever remain there. They fail to understand that language is about discovery, and one "learns" it only at elementary level.

Example 1: After consulting his $300 dictionary, a student of mind ended up saying: �I am fortitude� when he simply meant: �I�m strong�.

Example 2: After realizing that his omniscient dictionary had failed in providing him with an adequate answer: another student of mine asked me yesterday: "What's the difference between really and very?� I replied: "It is for you to discover. I am not your mother, so stop relying on me for every stupid question that you have". Needless to say he was insulted, and if I cared any less I would have to be dead.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Jyulee]

[ls650]

[Gregor]

Jyulee,
I'm gonna guess that you haven't been doing TEFL for very long.
No one, I don't think, is demonizing dictionaries for self-study, not even bilingual ones. That's how I learned Spanish, myself.
You have to realize that it's not te same thing, though. IFor one thing, I was learning Spanish on my own, with no class or teacher. For another thing, I was living in a Spanish-speaking country (Mexico).
In a classroom, we are trying to help these people to learn English, on their own, NOT in an English-speaking environment.
If, on their own, they choose to use a bilingual dictionary, then whatever. I don't care. NO ONE DOES.
The idea in class, though, is to show them how they can use whatever English they have to learn MORE English. if you teach ESL from a coursebook, pay close attention to, say, the listening exercises. The students are not meant to understand every word. They are meant to listen for specific information. They are being taught how to take a native English speaker and extrapolate what they NEED to understand. They are being taught that they don't NEED to understand every word to get the gist of what's going on.
In a reading passage, it's the same. They are being taught (if the teacher has any idea what he/she is doing) how to work out the meaning of a difficult (for that level) passage in context. Words they don't know come up. That is by design. In a classroom setting, they are being asked to work it out based on what they DO know. If you translate, or ALLOW translation, then you are undermining the very point of the lesson.
OK, say a word comes up that doesn't relate to the passage or whatever. Why not just translate THAT and move on? What harm?? That's what the students are doing in their free time, anyway, right?
Sure. But if the teacher (and a SKILLED teacher is required for this) is capable of EXPLAINING the word in English terms that the student can understand, then that student will learn that much more about how to use the target language to aquire MORE of the target language.
Outside of class, the students can do what they want, and that's FINE.
But IN class, the students are supposed to learn SKILLS, not just grammar and vocabulary. We're supposed to be giving them the tools to use whatever they have access to. A Mexican doesn't understand what an American tourist is talking about, for example, but said Mexican had a calss of MINE, and now the tourist wants to know where to get something to eat.
"Where can I get some grub?" Maybe the tourist says. YOUR student may fly for a dictionary, and I don't know what the result would be, but even if he found "grub," it might take some time. MY student, listening in, might chime in and ask, "What does THAT mean? "Grub"??" And the tourist, a complete idiot, might say, "I just want to chow, man. I'm HUNGRY."
Your student is still working on the definition of "grub." My student has just let it go, with no interest whatsoever about "grub" or "chow," but focused on "hungry" and given the guy directions to a really good taco shop or something.
That may seem a simplistic example, but what are you teaching? If you are teaching, in the classroom, translation, then nothing will do to your poor student but to understand the word. In MY class, though, they have learned that there are other ways of getting information.
Is that obvious to you? Well, it isn't obvious to a lot of students who have never studied a foreign language before.

[Jyulee]

Hi Gregor

[sigmoid]

Dictionaries are an obviously useful resource for learning a language. When I study a language myself I use a dictionary.

Students buy them and can certainly bring them to class since it's their class, not mine.

[Deconstructor]

[Deconstructor]

What students need is not a dictionary but strategies to cope with new words. They need to actively participate in language instead of constantly looking for an easy way out, which is what a dictionary overuse amounts to.

Strategy 1: Guessing from context
Students must be taught to guess from context, taking an educated guess, which means some risk taking. The exact meaning of the word is not necessary; this is of course what students want: absolution.

Strategy 2: read on/continue listening
As students continue to read or listen, there are often clues in the form of explanations, examples, repetitions of the idea, etc. which provide meaning for the part the student didn't understand.

Strategy 3: Focus on ideas and not on isolated words
Students need to understand that by focusing on individual words they may in fact understand less of the information because they will not be focusing on the ideas that are developed in the text.

These are great strategies that are difficult to implement for teachers and seem very strange to students, at least in the beginning.

Why is there so much reliance on the dictionary? Well, it�s much easier for most teachers to simply let students use dictionaries rather than undertake an entire methodology. Furthermore, most students are lazy and most students are stupid.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Deconstructor]

[valley_girl]

I don't agree that most students are lazy and/or stupid. You do encounter the odd lazy one or one that might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Such is life. However, I think that the majority are reasonably bright and reasonably hard-working (or at least, such has been my experience in ELT). I believe that there is simply a lot of pressure on many of these students to do well, for whatever personal reasons. Ergo, they are going to look for any shortcut that is available to them. It has nothing to do with stupidity or laziness. It has to do with fear of failure, fear of 'losing face', fear of letting family members down. The challenge is to try to convince them that they are only slowing down their language acquisition by using these shortcuts and then to try to teach them the skills which will help them to learn new vocabulary and structures without constantly resorting to L2-L1 or L1-L2 translation. Personally, I find that once the students get the fact that I am trying to help them, not hinder them, they usually acquiesce. Nonetheless, there are always those few who continue to submit essays that force me to look up words in my *own* dictionary.

[Roger]