The New Oxford Picture Dictionary: English-Chinese [Paperback]

a very good book, for my 7-year old boy who is an ESL student who only knows few words now.

I use multiple versions of this book to help my students (mostly beginning and intermediate) enlarge their English vocabulary. I am currently using the Spanish-English, Chinese-English and Korean-English versions. I believe that they are good books, and very useful as supplements to ESL classes. THE GOOD: 1) The book is organized nicely for teaching beginning level students. It is organized into 12 units, such as: people, housing and recreation. This makes it easy to find a good vocabulary list for students to concentrate on. 2) The full color illustrations are nice, and make it easy for students to understand the word, even if they are using the monolingual edition. It is nice for students to try to figure out or learn the word without depending on the written translation. 3) Each page has some teaching suggestions at the bottom. While I don't always use them, they have come in handy for giving my students extra practice at using the new vocabulary. 4) There are some nice indices at the back of the book. These cover everything from irregular verbs to geography to alphabetical listings of the vocabulary. THE BAD: 1) While there are many good words, there are also a lot of common words missing. I find myself using a regular English-language dictionary to explain some words to my students. 2) Some of the translations aren't that great. My students have found errors (or just an outdated word) in both the Spanish-English and Korean-English versions. 3) This dictionary really is for beginning or intermediate users. My advanced students don't really like using it, as they already know most of the words in it. OVERALL: The Oxford Picture Dictionaries are great tools when used to supplement a lower level class. But if you are teaching more advanced students, maybe some other language-English dictionary would be better.

The New Oxford Pciture Dictionary (English/Chinese) is not useful for English-speaking students of Chinese. There is no transliteration for the Chinese characters, which are printed in a very hard-to-read light blue ink. This dictionary could be useful to Chinese-speaking students of English. However, they would need a good knowledge of the Western alphabet and sound system to use it.