Chapter 8

Online reference tools

· Dictionaries

There are many dictionaries that usually used by learners like bilingual, semi-bilingual or monolingual dictionaries. Traditionally monolingual dictionaries have been used by higher-level learners, but increasingly there is a wide range of monolingual dictionaries that have been written for learners with a lower level of language proficiency. Teacher can find the appropiate dictionary by clicking on terms in popular word processing programs or on web pages. Some electronic dictionaries are also available free online with limited functionality, for example including the definition but not giving teacher the audio. Clearly, these electronic dictionaries provide a powerful resource for learners working on their own in the classroom.

· Thesauruses

Thesauruses are more suited to the intermediate and advance levels than to the elementary or pre-intermediate levels, where much more language is new to the learners. A thesaurus can be used for writing projects. It can encourage leraners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically.

· Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis

A concordancer is similar to a search engine in many respects. Essentially, it is a samll program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurences of particular words or phrases. Corpus can be used for generating test material. It can be used for higher levels. A corpus can serve as a useful reference tool in the classroom for the more intricate example of language use.