Innovation in Language Learning

The presentation deals with one possible way in which technology can assist in students’ higher level of engagement with vocabulary, aimed at acquiring a deeper knowledge of words. By building the online dictionary (while preparing the dictionary entries), students encounter a lot of information about a word. They begin to know its nuances, e.g. the different aspects of a word such as collocations, connotation, synonyms and antonyms, the origin of a word. The presentation will focus on the project 'Building an Online Bidirectional English-Croatian Business Dictionary', being carried out at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, Varaždin, namely, one part of the larger project 'The Application of Automatic Programming and Data Mining Techniques in Building Online Dictionaries'. Students’ dictionary entries are the key words of the presentations which they are required to deliver in the class. Exploring the key words and preparing the dictionary entries assures the productive dimension of the key vocabulary knowledge required when delivering a presentation.  While exploring a business topic of their presentation, students are using a wide range of online resources, and are working with authentic materials, identifying and learning lexical units in context. Consulting different online reference tools to find and check all the aspect of the key vocabulary knowledge and preparing this key vocabulary as their contribution to the online dictionary entries requires a higher level of engagement with vocabulary and enables acquiring a deeper knowledge of words. As technology is the preferred working environment of today's students (the so-called ‘digital natives’), such activities are motivating. In addition, they create a student-centered learning environment which promotes learner autonomy and encourages life-long vocabulary learning. Because of the required amount of vocabulary, and time constraints in the average language course at the tertiary level, students are expected to do most of their vocabulary learning independently of the teacher. Since using and consulting several dictionaries has a positive impact on vocabulary learning,  students should be encouraged to develop dictionary skills and use dictionaries independently, in a consistent and appropriate manner.

A brief description will be given of the IT platform used for the dictionary, and more details will be provided about students' work on dictionary entries, and the possibilities this online dictionary offers to its users.