Intellectual Work Skills and Processing a Lexicographic Article

One of the innovations of the Standards of Professional Competence for Teachers in General Education (Primary and Secondary) concerns the teacher’s responsibility in developing the students’ intellectual work skills. In this respect a crucial activity for the teachers is documentation from adequate sources and then the processing of the information. Documentation from dictionaries and encyclopedias goes beyond the Language and Communication curriculum area and becomes an interdisciplinary skill, along with information selection and sorting. The development of this skill starts with a knowledge and understanding of dictionaries, of the peculiarities of article organization, and ends with problem-solving: how do we decipher the meaning of a word not yet represented in Romanian dictionaries? How do we understand a meaning that has not yet been defined?