All students benefit from work on dictionary skills. Some can be very slow at looking up words, and finding a single lexical item can take them away from the text for anything up to three minutes - a clear deterrent to fluent reading. Preliminary work on using headwords and speed search activities in pairs are probably a good idea in such cases.

Practice at getting at the most appropriate meaning of a word from listings in the dictionary is also vital. Whole-group work on this is advisable with any group of first-year students, as it familiarizes learners with typical conventions of layout, labelling and exemplification.

However, students also need to learn that dictionaries should be used sparingly. Constant recourse to a dictionary is the greatest enemy of extensive reading, in particular. Notwithstanding Day and Bamford's formula of 'i minus 1' (see section 7.7.5), one of the goals must be for students to be able to read effectively while ignoring unknown items of vocabulary or using guesses or 'word-attack' strategies (see section 7.5.2) to get at their meaning. It is clearly better for fluency and motivation if dictionaries can be avoided; and where graded readers with accompanying vocabulary lists are being used, it may well be possible to banish dictionaries entirely. This is highly desirable as it helps to establish in students' minds extensive reading as a very different activity from the intensive work on L2 texts that most will be familiar with from the foreign language classroom. It is especially important that those students who feel they must look up unfamiliar words even when the meaning is not essential to understanding the immediate context, accept that this almost instinctive reaction is an inappropriate approach to extensive reading and is one they must suppress.

One technique to develop the greater discipline needed is to limit learners to, say, two 'look-ups' per page. Alternatively, so as to avoid disrupting fluent reading, students might mark unknown words in pencil and then, at the end of the section or chapter, go back and look up some of them (and possibly make a note of a few key ones in a reading vocabulary book). With experience, students will soon learn which words are central to understanding and which can be passed over, thus reducing the number of items they need to look up.