Le Baron wrote:tractor wrote:Le Baron wrote:In his discussion of teachers insisting upon the use of monolingual dictionaries (his myth 7) I wonder how true this is in reality outside of ESL teaching; or even how true within it.
I've had several teachers who professed this myth, both in Spain and in Norway. It may have been a fad in the nineties.
Blimey. How odd. What made them insist upon this?
They even said bilingual dictionaries were harmful to our learning. I think the idea behind it was something like this: "You should learn to think in the target language. Don't make translations in your head. The definitions in a monolingual dictionary are more accurate than in a bilingual one, and give you a better understanding of the word and how it is used, and develop your vocabulary faster." I don't think any of the students bought into this, and we continued to peek in our bilingual dictionaries behind the teacher's back. Strange thing is, some of these teachers were otherwise excellent teachers, in spite of this rather bizarre idea. It's like telling a carpenter that he should never use the hammer nor the saw, only the screwdriver.