Euralex 2026: directions in lexicography in the global south: ESP (pt3)

In my last post, I talked about some of the ASHDRA dictionary research projects aimed at developing resources for speakers of minority local languages trying to learn English, often in highly multilingual contexts and with few existing reference resources available.

In this post, I'll look at the second theme to emerge from ASHDRA applications which is resources for learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) either for study or in professional settings. A first reaction to this theme might be that it's a universal need rather than specific to learners in the Global South. And to an extent this may be true, but not necessarily. 

A report by the British Council (2021) highlighted that whilst English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in higher education has grown globally in recent years, very little research has been carried out into the specific needs of EMI students in the Global South and to what extent they may differ. In the realm of ESP, you might ask whether existing ESP resources, designed largely in and for the Global North, are practically accessible in Global South contexts. What the impact is of a non-European L1 and cultural background? And whether the same disciplines are equally in demand?

ASHDRA research proposals in this area have been incredibly wide-ranging. Just a few topic areas: medicine, STEM, maths, physics, maritime, tourism, biotech, mining engineering, women’s health, and winemaking.  I'll give examples of just two case studies.

Chinh was doing her PhD in Australia, but her research was focused on medical students in her native Vietnam. Her research found that a particular area of challenge for them was not so much around specialist medical terminology, but semi-technical vocabulary - words that have both a lay, everyday use and a more specific medical sense, such as lobe and benign. They struggled to understand the interrelations between senses and found they were falling between two types of resources - specialized medical dictionaries which often only focused on technical senses and were sometimes hard to understand for an L2-English speaker, and general learner's dictionaries which didn't always give enough detail about the medical uses. To bridge this gap, she developed a visual dictionary, SemiMed, which uses diagrams to show how senses are connected, and which she trialled and refined with the help of Vietnamese medical students to address their specific needs.

Nurfitriah's ASHDRA project arose out of a very specific discipline for which there's a high demand in her home country of Indonesia - mining engineering. And to be more precise, the need for mining engineering students to get to grips with the English vocabulary used in the industry standard software, MineScape. 

Now, normally if you want to explore the key vocab in a particular discipline, you collect up a bunch of texts and put them together into a corpus which you can then use to establish a wordlist of discipline-specific terms. The trouble here, though, was that the vocab was spread throughout the software in menus, instructions, labels on images, etc. rather than in straightforward passages of text. And what's more, the vocab you come across varies depending on your task and route through the software. So, Nurfitriah used a systematic approach to extract lists of potential key terms from the software using several AI platforms, then got the lists assessed by human subject experts to whittle them down to a list of terms that were relevant and helpful to students.

What both projects have in common is innovative solutions built around the real needs of a particular group of learners in a particular context.

You can find Chinh’s research report on the ASHDRA page of the Hornby Trust website and Nurfitriah’s report will be up very soon. To read any reports from past ASHDRA projects, along with simple one-page summaries, just scroll down to the bottom of the page.

In my fourth and final post, I'll talk about research into the development of inclusive resources for learners who can't easily access traditional dictionaries.