In this article, Margaret Deuter, a managing editor in the ELT
dictionaries department at Oxford University Press, looks at why
proper use of dictionaries is so important to English language
learners. It’s not the stuff of spy novels, editing
dictionaries. But some teachers act as if we were producing some
subversive material that should be handled with extreme care.
It’s depressing for those of us who work to make dictionaries
useful resources for learners to go to conferences and hear
teacher trainers telling their audiences that dictionaries
should be kept out of the classroom. Or to read in a coursebook
multiple strategies for getting students to guess the meanings
of words and only as a last resort to look them up in a
dictionary. We all know that using a dictionary badly can lead
to hilarious results – well, not so funny if as a student you
get a really bad mark because of it; but funny, for example, to
visitors at this hotel where in the restaurant, “regional and
international courts are offered to win