Play the dictionary game and win     020

There is a growing trend among students to use dictionaries found on the Internet, or electronic dictionaries. These are very fast, and of course this is the attraction. However there is also a major disadvantage—students are missing out on learning valuable reading skills. You see as students get older, during tests and assessment tasks they will have to access and operate on large slabs of text. They may have to find answers to questions, and locate various writing and language features. This means they have to be able to scan text very quickly.

When students are using a hard copy dictionary, scanning is precisely the skill that is constantly used. Students must run their eyes down the page to quickly locate the word they are looking for. So a hardcopy dictionary provides not just the meaning but a reading lesson as well.

Why not play the dictionary game with your primary school child? Open up a primary school dictionary, and choose a word somewhere on the double page spread, a simple word which you know your child can read. Then ask the child to find the word, and measure the time taken. Also measure the physical distance that your child scanned down the columns. It might be, for example, that scanning down 25 cm takes five seconds. Over a few weeks play this game regularly. Total all the distances, and all the times, then divide the time into the distance, resulting in an average scanning distance per second. This is a baseline or a starting point.

Over the next few months don’t bother to measure anything, just play the game, from time to time. Then after say six months recommence timing and measuring. You might be pleasantly surprised by the improvement. In all this your child must be enjoying the activity otherwise nothing good is being accomplished.

Actually a good quality hard copy dictionary provides more precise definitions than perhaps are available in Internet dictionaries. Sometimes there is more attention to labelling different parts of speech, and of course you are guaranteed correct Australian spelling. I use two dictionaries, The Oxford Australian School Dictionary and The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, however some parents might prefer to buy the Macquarie dictionaries.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services