DICTIONARIES are a Treasure. I don't use them enough. They are a gift, and a tool one inevitably invests in. I grew up with the Bulgarian edition, two hard-back volumes English-Bulgarian bilingual dictionary, which belongs to my mother and she keeps in the library.
I took them for granted then, and referred to the family Webster's thesaurus (monolingual). But now that I have been far from Bulgarian texts, I find they have preserved a wealth of Bulgarian I've not loved in decades. Wonderful to be close to these times again.
In London I had set this aside, I was exposed to the living language, and ART BOOKS, which I could easily find. So, the Webster's linguistic definitions were substituted by the glossy illustrations of The Art Book.
In Mexico I inherited for a short while a hefty Larousse edition, also wonderful: Spanish-English. Later on I found the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which is great. I recommend this for all learners beginner to advanced. It's accessible and easy to carry around, and lend to learners when at a loss for the right word/phrase. The featured Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary with CD-ROM is fantastic. There are plenty of activities you could do with your students, and more so with the available CD-ROM. If you have access to a computer room, you could work with a few CD-ROMs in pairs or small groups. If that isn't possible, you can do wonders with a laptop and a portable projector. I also recommend their online dictionaries, they're an excellent Internet tool.
Look after them, preserve them, compile them, and introduce your students to them.
Here's a useful link to the British Council/BBC Teaching English website, with an informative article on dictionary work in the classroom.
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