Buckland Weekly #3: Dictionaries and Discussion Monitoring

In this series of posts I intend to address various questions that teachers, both old and new, have raised with me from time to time. All my answers are based on a combination of my own experience as a teacher, both in China and the UK, and published studies. Because of the element of personal experience all posts should be treated as my opinion only. As they say on the internet, your mileage may vary.

An activity that I sometimes use in class for vocabulary development is to give a text (appropriate to the grade and level of the students) with several of the more difficult words underlined. I then get the students to read the text and write down the meanings of those words, in English. If they don’t know the words they are allowed to use their dictionaries to find them. This is a short activity (usually near the start of a lesson) designed to give them the necessary vocabulary for a subsequent discussion activity. By doing it in groups there is an element of speaking and listening added as they give each other the answers. It’s unremarkable and uncontroversial.

Where I sometimes run into opposition from the Chinese teachers is in allowing the use of the dictionaries on their phones. The schools often have a “no phones in class” policy and like to stick to it. My view is that we are living in an age where electronic dictionaries are more commonly used than paper ones and, after all, a dictionary is a dictionary. I allow it. More than that, I encourage it. I tell my students that dictionaries are always OK in my lessons, though I encourage them to ask me if there are words they don’t understand. Students tend not to use their phone dictionaries anyway unless I actively tell them to, though they often use paper dictionaries.

Your policy is, of course, up to you, but if you decide to allow phone dictionaries and the school raises an objection then I suggest that you explain exactly why you are doing it, tell them that you allow phones to be used strictly for the duration of the activity and ask them what they think. If the school absolutely insists or (as I have occasionally seen) does not allow phones to even be taken into the classroom, then there is nothing you can do but follow the rules. Personally, I see no difference between using either type of dictionary.

The main activity of many of my senior lessons is a discussion activity: usually with groups talking about a series of questions on the topic of the lesson. For an example, look at my lesson plan for “Charity Begins At Home”.  When planning this type of activity I always try to think of answers on both sides of the topic. If the students are discussing, say, whether a good diet is more or less important for your health than exercise, I try to think of reasons that it is and reasons that it isn't. Then when I monitor the discussions by walking round the class and joining each group in turn, I can take the opposite view to whatever they have decided. I find this “devil’s advocate” approach stimulates discussion far more than presenting my genuine views. It’s also helpful, because thinking about it in advance speeds up your response and lets the discussion run more smoothly.

I will do a longer piece on error correction later, but the approach that I take when monitoring discussion activities is that I only correct where there is an error that seriously impedes the activity. Where a student manages to express what they want to say clearly, even if it has some small errors, I don’t generally correct. There are a number of reasons for this. Practically it would slow down the class but more importantly is the matter of confidence. The students are trying hard to express themselves and nit-picking their grammar in this type of activity undermines them and discourages participation. It’s often better to allow the flow of the discussion to continue uncorrected. If there is a point that comes up in several groups, I will often take a couple of minutes AFTER the activity to go through it on the board for the whole class.