e-CONNECTION August 2008

CD-ROM dictionaries: making life easier for students and teachers by Elizabeth Walter

When I mentioned to a friend that I had been travelling a lot recently, giving talks to teachers, the response was one of incredulity.‘About dictionaries’Hard as it might be for us lexicographers to accept, dictionaries are very much a minority interest.Our best efforts with corpora, carefully-chosen defining vocabularies, usage notes, artwork and all the other bells-and-whistles we toil over so lovingly tend to elicit only the polite attention due to something necessary and respected but essentially rather dull.

So having CD-ROM dictionaries to demonstrate has been a wonderful breath of fresh air for us.Both teachers and students are excited by this new method of accessing information, and impressed by the immense resource they have at their fingertips.Teachers, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to be the more sceptical audience, although once they have seen the CD-ROMs in action, they are usually converted.A fair number of students already use CD-ROM dictionaries, often bilinguals, and although many of them offer nothing more than a quicker look-up facility, this is enough to give them the edge over the book versions.This enthusiasm is reflected in our sales figures, which show a ratio massively in favour of ‘with-CD-ROM’ versions.

One of the biggest advantages of a CD-ROM dictionary is that it can help to make a monolingual dictionary a more realistic proposition for intermediate learners.Issues of spelling, pronunciation, and comprehension are all dealt with in a much more flexible way than is possible in a book, and learners in their teens or early twenties are typically comfortable with accessing information on-screen, and, perhaps more importantly, actually enjoy doing so.

Of course, the functionality of CD-ROMs varies greatly between products, and it is important to read the small print, especially as some CD-ROMs which come with dictionaries contain only a subset of the features available on a separate, higher-cost version.All the features discussed below come as standard on the CD-ROM accompanying the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary, but the list is by no means exhaustive, and some CD-ROMs have other features, such as video clips.

A dictionary and thesaurus in one
The Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary CD-ROM contains a function which turns the whole dictionary into a thesaurus too. Each meaning in the dictionary has a button called ‘Related Words’, which brings up lists of words in the same topic group or the same semantic area.

Need a synonym for ‘thin’.Click on ‘related words’ and the following list appears: anorexic, bony, emaciated, gaunt, lanky, lean, petite, pinched, scrawny, skinny, slender, slight, slim, svelte, thin, trim, underweight, weedy.

Lists like this can be used for expanding vocabulary, and can be printed out.Clicking on any word in the list brings up its definition.Teachers could ask their students to go through the list and say which words have positive connotations (e.g. svelte, slender) and which negative (e.g. scrawny, emaciated).

The thesaurus function can be used for preparing for a topic or a lesson, or for preparing to write an essay.For instance, clicking on the related words of ‘computer’ brings up a list of vocabulary including items such as chip, hardware, laptop, memory, mouse, printer and RAM.

Pronunciation
This is an area where the CD-ROM can really come into its own.No more struggling with phonetic symbols – just a click and the word is spoken.Pronunciation practice enables students to record their own attempts at a word and compare them with the voice on the CD-ROM.Differences between British and American pronunciation can be clearly demonstrated in this way.

Filters
Filters are an immensely powerful tool, performing searches on any aspect of the dictionary, for example grammar, register, or region,or any combination of these aspects.A list of attributive adjectives, which might have taken hours of brain-racking, can be accessed by selecting adjectives from the list of parts of speech, and ‘always before noun’ from the list of grammar codes.A list of their entries, complete with example sentences, will then appear.Formal nouns, verbs which are followed by an –ing form, idioms containing the word ‘head’, words in the dictionary that are trademarks ... the combinations go on and on, all easily accessible from a CD-ROM in a way which is completely impossible from the page.

Copying and pasting
The facility to copy and paste whole entries or selections of entries provides a huge resource for teachers.For instance, with a CD-ROM it is easy to access every single example in the dictionary which contains a particular word, not just the examples at its own entry.So for a gap-fill exercise on commonly confused words (e.g. work and job), plenty of examples can be found and pasted into a document, and the ‘find and replace’ function used to create gaps.

Glossaries for use with newspaper articles or other reading assignments can be created easily by copying definitions from the dictionary into a word processing document.It is also possible to customize what is copied, turning off whichever elements are not needed (e.g. pronunciation, examples).

Spelling
The first and most fundamental thing the dictionary user needs to do is find the word they are looking for, and for many students this can be an insurmountable hurdle.The CD-ROM allows much more flexible searching.The word list builds up as each letter is typed into the search box, so it is possible to get to a word by knowing only the first two or three letters.Wildcards can also be used, so for example g*ge will find ‘gauge’, r*barb will find ‘rhubarb’, and *ology will find ‘psychology’.Opposites can be found in a similar way: *logical finds ‘illogical’, *reliable finds ‘unreliable’.Idioms too are easier to find.There is no need to guess at which constituent element they are listed, since a search on any word brings up all the idioms containing that word.

Help
It is well known that dictionary users rarely look at introductions or ‘how to use’ pages.With a CD-ROM dictionary, help is situated just where it is needed.If a grammar code, part-of-speech label, or register label is unknown, clicking on it will bring up a brief explanation.Similarly, clicking on any word in a definition or an example sentence takes the user straight to the entry for that word, avoiding tedious looking up.At any point, instructions on all the functions, such as copying and pasting, customizing entries, or integrating the CD-ROM with a word processor are instantly available.

Another useful facility for the self-study user is the ability to add notes.While most people balk at scribbling in books, there is no such restriction on a CD-ROM, and the user’s own annotations can be added at any entry.CD-ROMs can be very convenient too.If they are running in the background, a couple of keystrokes takes the user from a word in whatever document they are using straight to the dictionary entry for that word.

Exercises
CD-ROMs have much more scope than book dictionaries for interactive exercises.Random selections of questions on topics such as phrasal verbs, verb patterns, and irregular verbs are generated, and the system will mark and correct students’ replies, and lead them to the relevant study pages if required.Pictures can also be presented imaginatively on a CD-ROM, with drag and drop exercises using their labels.Exercises can be printed out and used in class.

The exciting thing about CD-ROM dictionaries is that they transform a list of words into an interactive tool, providing features that were never available in printed dictionaries.The ability to perform detailed searches on the huge amounts of data which dictionaries contain means that they can provide teachers with a wealth of examples for just about any point they wish to make, while copying and pasting facilitates the preparation of exercises and classroom activities.For the student, a medium which they enjoy using, and which provides the help they need in the place they need it encourages browsing, can give less advanced students the confidence they need to use monolingual dictionaries.

出處：This article first appeared in Modern English Teacher, Vol 11, No1, 2002. We are grateful for their permission to reproduce it here.

作者簡介：Elizabeth Walter is a senior commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press, where she is responsible for setting up and managing ELT dictionary projects. She has worked on a wide range of titles, from bilingual thesauri to dictionaries of phrasal verbs and idioms, and was managing editor of the recently published Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary.

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