Reseña

In a constantly changing linguistic environment, where new words emerge everyday and some of them become part of our daily lives, this dictionary summarizes the personality of the Chilean population through words.

Different expressions and words that are the truthful evidence of how each South American country has its own variations and differences, despite the fact that most of them share a common language.

These definitions were made by the protagonists of the culture, the people, and in this case the students of this large country called Chile. Therefore, it is important to mention that the Dictionary’s mission was not only to translate and define words for foreigners, it was conceived as a project during the 8th grade English course in the school Patricio Lynch, always under the clear conviction that as teachers we have with education and the changes that we hope to make.

The following dictionary was intended to trigger students’ awareness regarding intercultural competences, rather than just a list of grammatical structures that they will hardly ever use they way is taught in school. The project started off as a mere activity from the course book, where a sample page from a dictionary was shown so that students could understand how to look up vocabulary, check pronunciation, verb forms, etc. As the lesson went by, I had a brief flashback of an activity I did years ago, in which learners were meant to create 1-page dictionaries of typical expressions in Chile. I always thought that students could have done that assessment better, leading to a more meaningful outcome that might have strengthened and engaged them to the English Language a bit more.

8th Graders wanted to carried out this project, so different groups were formed and each one of them goggled as many expressions as they could. Weekly, students submitted a report discussing the words or expressions found in social networks, Chilean websites or TV Programs. Then, drafts of possible definitions for each one the expressions / words were presented to me, checking grammar, spelling and the message they really wanted to get across.

At the end of 2017, words and their corresponding expressions were finally emailed. At first I thought that marking that assignment would not be difficult at all; however, it turned out to be one of the greatest and most difficult challenging things that I have ever done in my short life. So, as you read the word entries and the corresponding definition, please consider any mistake that you might spot as my responsibility. We did not
want to include pronunciation, the part of speech or the origin of all the words included mainly due to time constraints. However, there is an agreement with the class to work in a second edition if it is told to do so.
I sincerely hope this simple yet time-consuming task helps students to understand the importance of cultural exchange, helping English-speaking readers who might struggle with the Chilean language and its difficulty compared to our south American neighbors.