Making ASHDRA more accessible

Last month, I finally got to meet up in person with my fellow panel members for the AS Hornby Trust Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) after two years of meeting via Zoom because of Covid and then train strikes! We met at the British Council offices in Stratford, East London and had a really productive day, properly getting into a whole range of topics.

The rather swanky British Council offices in Stratford

One topic we discussed was how to spread the word about the awards more widely and to encourage more applications. As part of that, we agreed that it would be good to make the information on the website a bit more accessible.

As the first reports have come in from research projects over the past year, I’ve taken on the job of working with the researchers to edit them for the website. I don’t often take on the role of editor, but when I do, it’s the process of helping the writer to see their text from the viewpoint of a reader, drawing out the important points, highlighting what they’ve missed out and sometimes, what they don’t need that I enjoy the most. Seeing a writer pleased with the improvements we’ve made together to their report is really satisfying.

So far, we have four research reports available to download on the website, with a couple more in the pipeline, which should help prospective applicants get a feel for the kinds of projects that ASHDRA funds. However, the reports are quite long - often 25 pages+ - and pretty detailed. Now, of course, that’s what you’d expect from a report on a serious piece of research, and we love all that nitty gritty detail. But well, for someone just browsing the website out of interest or to see whether ASHDRA might be for them, they’re perhaps rather TL;DR!

I suggested that as well as the full reports, we could maybe include shorter, more accessible summaries of each project. Talk about managing to land yourself with extra work! But honestly, it was actually a really fun task, trying to condense each project down to its key points and ‘translating’ it from a more formal academic style to something snappier and more informal. In fact, I think it’s the essence of what I love about lexicography – taking in lots of detailed and sometimes quite specialized information and finding a way to convey it in a clear, concise form.

So, now on the website you can see the full reports of the completed ASHDRA projects, one-page summaries of each, and also a list of the on-going projects too. All of which, hopefully, helps to give a clearer idea of what ASHDRA is all about.

And all just in time for the 2023 call for proposals that’s now open! 

 

If you're interested in digging deeper into any aspect of dictionaries in ELT – how they’re used, how effective they are, how they fit into classroom practice, or maybe researching and creating a new dictionary-style resource (in any context and on any scale) – or you know someone who is – then please do go and take a look at the website here.