Online dictionary usage skills and Word Choice Activities

Non-native speakers are typically very afraid of English to English dictionaries. However, these can be a very important resource for developing their facility with word choice. Here is a potential extra credit assignment that you can extend to your non-native speakers.

So as not to provide disproportionate opportunities to these students, you could covertly offer this as an alternative to a higher-level style activity assigned for extra-credit to the rest of the class (the other students will understand that non-native speakers have different needs).

The three word choice resources that follow can be used in the same manner, as enrichment exercises for your non-native speakers. These assignments are short but very helpful for non-native speakers. They can be used as additional homework activities towards the beginning of term (provided that you require your native speakers to do an additional assignment as well).

Using Online Dictionaries

Go to

Type in the word “dog” and see how the following dictionaries define the word. Then look through three more dictionaries and assess how useful each will be for your purposes. Indicate which you think would be most useful for you.

Insert the definition of the word here. / What kind of information does this dictionary provide?
Is the definition easy to understand?
Are there additional features provided?
Webster’s 1828 Dictionary
American Heritage
Cambridge Dictionary of American English

Use to find the definitions of the following words. Then determine whether the word is appropriate for academic writing. Write your answers next to the words below.

Warning signs that will let you know that a word is not appropriate for academic writing:
Is the word only found in very few dictionaries? (this suggests that not many dictionaries consider this a word) / Do you see obsolete (obs.) or archaic (arch.) next to the word? (this indicates that the word is no longer used) / Do you see slang, informal or colloquial (colloq.) next to the word? / Does anything in the definition of the word suggest that it is not appropriate for academic writing?
malison
muffin top
speakeasy
denunciation

Using Visual Thesauruses

This thesaurus gives you different families of synonyms and definitions of words. Click on the tabs at the top of the page to switch between the dictionary and thesaurus.

This thesaurus shows a visual representation of synonyms with related usages. You can use this guide to see the parts of speech (see the color guide on the left) and the definitions of each synonym (hover your mouse over the words to reveal these).

Look up the word “grow” in these thesauruses. Use what these two sites show you about the different types of meanings for these words to determine a synonym for “grow” in the sentences below. Be as specific as possible.

1. The number of tomatoes grew dramatically during the ten years that followed the flood.

2. The old woman grew and ate only tomatoes for years before dying of malnutrition.

3. The tomato grew into the largest of its kind, winning awards all over the southeast.

4. The tomato she found had grown from seeds carelessly left behind the previous year.

Using Online Corpuses

Go to

Click on the chart button in the upper left corner of the screen. When you type in the word “stuff,” you will find that this word is normally used in spoken English rather than academic English.

Part 1: Look up the following phrases in the corpus. In what genres are these phrases typically used?

spoken / fiction / magazine / newspaper / academic
a lot of
a significant number of
a great many

Part 2: Examining usage

1. Look up zeal in the dictionary and write down a definition.

In what contexts would you use this word?

Is it a positive word or a negative word?

2. Click on the “list” tab and then look up zeal* in the corpus. This will give you all of the words that begin with this root. Click on the word zealots. This will show you the different contexts where this word is found.

Does the word “zeal” have a similar definition, or are the meanings very different?

Is zealots a positive word or a negative word?

What is this word generally used to talk about?

What might you be discussing if you use this word?

Close reading revision exercise

Revise the following paragraph using the tools you have learned about to correct word choice.

Jnana grew up in a trivial village in western India. She instructed herself to read and spent most of her liberal time as a child reading books in the book store nigh her house. After a turgid childhood, she decided to abandon home and attend university. She went to Delhi and posing as a remunerating student, began learning about the domain of organic chemistry. By the age of 20, Jnana had created a cheap fertilizer that was to recast the farming practices in India.
Application exercise

It will be essential to indicate word choice issues in early papers that your non-native students write so that they can practice with revising specific cases using these tools. You can have them revise more generally (perhaps one paragraph at a time) for word choice when they are in the final stages of revision.