Review published in SATEFL Newsletter Vol. 23 No. 1 (Autumn 2003)
Editor-in-Chief: Michael Rundell (Macmillan)
Macmillan is the newest arrival in the present baby boom of dictionaries based on computerised corpora. Their intermediate learners' dictionary should certainly be added to our list of suggestions for students.
It boasts "more entries than any other", but the use of coloured thumb tabs to indicate each change of initial letter allows for speedy word-searching. The 3,500 most common words are highlighted in red, with an additional star system to indicate their frequency. Having recently encountered an eager beaver who was determined that the way to improve his vocabulary was to memorise the dictionary page by page, this would certainly make his task easier – and maybe, given a few years, achievable.
The defining vocabulary is helpfully restricted to 2,300 words, thus avoiding the exasperating need for further searching in order to understand the first word the student has looked up. Colour highlights within the entries provide extra information on grammar, collocations, common errors, related vocabulary and, particularly useful for CAE, word families. This can lead to lengthy entries for simple words - "go", for example, runs to three densely-packed pages - and might be off-putting for an intermediate level learner.
The sixteen colour plates illustrate subjects ranging from the house and the office to fruit and vegetables. The text also includes occasional line drawings and cartoons.
A detailed central section on language study covers topic vocabulary, collocation, pronunciation, register, etc with contributions from well-respected ELT authors.
Despite its detailed entries and supplementary sections, this is not a huge or heavy tome, and one which we could reasonably expect students to carry with them – thereby avoiding the need to provide a class set?
Margaret Wyllie
English Language Consultancy Ltd
Edinburgh