Second try :-)

 

My favourite monolingual print dictionary

Having looked at a number of monolingual print dictionaries in class this week, I have decided to buy the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. It is structured in a clear way: It starts with a short introduction on how to use it and offers some ‘extra help’ pages at the end. This last chapter not only offers information on communication and writing skills but also a short grammar section and a pronunciation table. Inside the dictionary you can find the pronunciation for every word, a sign indicating whether it is British or American English and the part of speech. Next to that you can also read about the different meanings of a word, how it is used and additional information on word families, idioms and homographs. Moreover the dictionary includes special boxes offering further information on commonly made mistakes, word partners and ways of expressing the same thing. This detailed information given for every word, combined with a clear layout and some additional pictures make the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary the ideal monolingual print dictionary for me.

 

Today we got back our second homework: the task was to write a paragraph, dealing with our favourite monolingual dictionary (in my case the Cambridge Advanced Learner's dictionary that we had looked at in one of the English classes). Surprisingly enough, my paragraph was not as bad as I had feared. Nevertheless I made some really unnecessary mistakes concerning vocabulary and wrong collocations. For example I wrote instruction instead of introduction and of course a dictionary doesn't provide an instruction for its readers... In my text I used expressions like "this broad information" or "explicatory pictures" which sound a bit German. So when looking at the marked version that Fiona gave me back today I realise that I really need to concentrate more on the right collocations and expressions in order to improve...