There are two kinds of dictionaries in the market, electronic and paper dictionary. Which on is your favourite dictionary? I have been attended a lesson for ‘improving ways to access English vocabulary and to help Senior Teacher Neil with his research project’. I brought a electronic dictionary when I came here but finally I found out it had been broken for the screen problem. I had to bought a paper dictionary at ‘Books Kinokuniya’ inside the ‘Ngee Ann City’, a handle dictionary because it’s more cheaper then the electronic in Singapore. Well, the little handle Longman Dictionary cost S$10. ‘Ngee Ann City’ is also called as ‘Takashimaya‘, it’s a an investment and managed by a Japanese Group, and it’s a famous shopping center you can find the information on the Tourism Guide in Singapore.

As for the Electronic Billngual Dictionaries, there’re several advantages as follow:

1. help poor spellers
2. have better portability
3. have a variety of look-up methods
4. easy and fast to use
5. can focus on specific language problems such as ‘false friends’
6. allows students to ’search’
7. easier to understand the definitions

And the Paper Monolingual Dictionaries have the advantages as:

a. doesn’t use the technology ‘wow’ factor
b. better for memory retention
c. teachers understand these better and can help their students
d. teachers understand the languages so can check if students are correct
e. uses better mental processing and makes students ‘think’
f. better for collocations and lexical phrases
g. uses example which put the words in context

Neil asked us to do some exercises to check which one is better to find out the meaning of the words or fill the gap for some short phrase in the class. I think the advance electric dictionaries are enough for learning new words, there are also have billngual and monolingual dictionaries in one electric dictionaries, and there have some example sentences if your electric dictionary is really a high-tech product.

I like the Lingoes Dictionary software for the computer users, it’s simple and you can download different kinds of dictionaries as a component, like the ‘Oxford Dictionary’, ‘Longman Dictionary’, ‘Collins COBUILD Advanced English Dictionary’ etc.

Takashimaya (Ngee Ann City), it has two towers, named as Tower A and Tower B.