It is a common knowledge that dictionaries are created to help up learn and understand foreign languages, but should we actually use them up to the point when they loose all their pages and turn into a skeleton of a book?

Many teachers claim that dictionaries are a first-hand help to students, and I am one of these teachers, for dictionaries are a piece of bread for beginners, as long as they do not possess a minimum of vocabulary to be able to get the meaning of words from the context.

Staring with multilanguage dictionaries later on students are supposed to be taught how to use English-English dictionaries, for they erase confusion, which might appear when polysemanticism takes place or the meaning is not quite understandable form the translation.

Walking dictionaries. Here is an activity, which can be organized in a classroom --> ask your students to become a walking Eng-Eng dictionary, thus explain meaning of some words and phrases using her own or his own language devices.

Analysis of a text. Ability to explain words, which comes from using one language dictionaries and practice, can be of great use while analyzing texts, the activity, which develops a good command of the language.

There are also electronic and on-line dictionaries, which have additional translations and are very continent to use.