Internet inspiration - Online dictionaries

English - German dictionary
Project a bilingual dictionary or glossary such as the Google dictionary or Wiktionary, Wikipedia's online dictionary and ...

1. Choose three words you want to introduce and ask learners to guess what they mean. Look up the words in the online dictionary

2. If it has a pronunciation feature, use it to show how they sound

3. Look up the English word and find other translations in the language you're teaching

4. Use search engines as big databases of the target language. Go to Google, for example, and type words into the search box. Look at the results and see the different contexts in which the words are used

5. Use search engines to check which words go together: for example if you put in inverted commas "Je pratique le tennis" you'll get about 116,000 results, but if you write "Je fais le tennis" you won't get any

6. Invite learners to write sentences or a creative story with the new words

Please contact us if you have any other ideas for using online dictionaries in class and we will publish the best ones.

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