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. 

Euralex 2026: directions in lexicography in the global south: multilingual resources (pt 2)

In my last post, I gave a bit of background to the ASHDRA awards and explained that in my Euralex session, Directions in lexicography in the Global South, I identified three trends to emerge from the research proposals we've received since the awards started in 2019. In this post, I'll talk a bit about the first and most widespread of those.

In some Global South countries, scores or even hundreds of languages are spoken, forming complex and often multi-layered linguistic patchworks. Let me jump straight in with an illustration from an ASHDRA project.

As in many ASHDRA projects, Agus wanted to target children in an under-developed area, in this case in West Borneo, who speak a local, minority language at home (Ketapang). They also use a more widely spoken regional language (Pontianak) and once they start school are taught largely through the medium of the country's official national language, Bahasa Indonesia. Then, they start to learn English … through the medium of their third language (L3). Coming from a largely monolingual background, just the idea of that blows my mind!

We see again and again in ASHDRA proposals how children from such communities who are often already at a social and economic disadvantage, then face this further linguistic disadvantage. In some contexts, this is compounded by the fact that schoolteachers may come from outside the community and may not share the children's home language.

In recent years, there's been a growing acknowledgement that using learners' L1 in the English language classroom, sometimes known as 'translanguaging', aids learning. In some countries, such as in India, this practice has become part of national curriculum guidelines. However, in many contexts, there is little training for teachers on how to implement such an approach and few resources to support them.

This is where the development of multilingual dictionary-style resources comes in, bringing together the learners' home language, for which there may be no existing references resources, as well as sometimes an L2 or even an L3, plus English.

In common with most ASHDRA projects, Agus wasn't aiming to create a full, comprehensive dictionary. Instead, his research was an exploratory project, creating and trialling a pilot resource. He used photographs from the linguistic landscape around the area, such as signs outside shops or food stalls, as the basis for a series of dictionary-style entries with translations of a key word into all four languages, along with example sentences and other information. These were then piloted in a school.

The reactions from both students and teachers were very positive, with students excited about being able to bring their home language into their English class and engaged by the images that connected what they were learning to their local environment and experiences. While limited in scope, the materials crucially provided an opportunity for teachers to introduce the concept of 'translanguaging' to their classroom.

The challenges: 

While the theme of such multilingual lexicographic resources aimed at bridging the gap between minority local languages and English has come out strongly among ASHDRA proposals, a number of challenges have emerged from those projects which have been completed.

Oral traditions: In some projects, the issue has emerged that some local languages are largely or entirely part of an oral tradition. This raises challenges for how or whether to include written forms of L1 vocabulary in a resource. Should words be transcribed in another script? Is this practical, useful or culturally appropriate? Images can be helpful in conveying many ideas but can be limited and potentially ambiguous. Audio recordings can be potentially useful but depend on relevant technology being accessible and affordable for the users.

Accessibility: I mentioned in my introductory post that the category of inclusive resources is wider than it first appears among ASHDRA applications and this is exactly what I meant. Accessibility and inclusion become key factors for resources aimed at many low-resource contexts, whether that’s to do with adapting to oral language traditions or other practical considerations. In her project targeted at South African schoolchildren, for instance, Lorna Morris developed a digital resource, but was aware that in many of her target areas, internet connections were expensive or patchy, so the resource needed to be preloaded onto devices, and what’s more, those devices needed to be battery operated to cope with frequent power outages.

Training: The need for training and support to use any new resource has also come up in several projects. In one Indian-based project, the research team introduced multilingual glossaries to teachers who seemed enthusiastic about how they could use the L1 translations in class. However, in observing actual lessons, researchers noticed that the teachers only highlighted and read out the English translations and examples, perhaps out of habit. So, although the L1 equivalents were available for the learners on the page, they weren't encouraged to actively engage with them or to actively use their home language in the class.

The number of proposals we’ve received for research into these kinds of contexts seems to indicate a clear demand for resources to plug these gaps. However, from the research projects ASHDRA’s already been involved with, we’ve seen that the answers aren’t always as straightforward as they might seem. Attention to the specifics of the local context, needs, restrictions, culture and expectations are all vital. That means a thorough and often flexible and creative approach to research, working closely with students, teachers and communities, as well as plenty of training and support.

 

If you'd like to read more about any of the completed ASHDRA projects, there are full research reports plus single-page summaries of each project available to download from the Hornby Trust website - just scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the completed projects. 

Euralex 2026: directions in lexicography in the global south (part 1)

At the recent Euralex (lexicography) conference in Vienna, I presented a paper called "Directions in lexicography in the Global South". You can read an extended abstract by downloading the book of abstracts from the Euralex website, but I thought I'd put together a slightly more accessible write-up aimed at a wider audience.

I'm going to split it across four posts. In this post, I'll give a bit of background and an overview, then I'll follow that with three posts looking at each of the three trends I talked about.

I was doing the session in my role with the AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA). For those of you who haven't heard me talk about ASHDRA before, the awards fund dictionary-related research projects in the area of ELT. They started in 2019 and I joined the panel in 2020.

Each year, we put out a call for proposals around early February. As a panel, we then review the applications that come in and select one or more research project to award funding to. The funding has ranged from £500 to £15,000 and the projects can last for either one or two years. The research must be related to dictionaries in some way and must have practical applications in English Language Teaching (as a second language). In line with the objectives of the Hornby Trust, we especially target research in/into low-resource contexts. That means a lot of our past projects have been in or for contexts in the Global South - thus the title of my paper. Although, we also fund research in under-resourced areas in the UK and elsewhere such as refugee education, ESOL, etc. and we don't exclude especially interesting or innovative research in other settings.

Since the awards started, we've gone through eight cycles and received 158 applications in total from 52 different countries and awarded funding to 18 research projects.

The global spread of ASHDRA applications

On the map, the orange dots represent 1-5 applications from that country. The larger dark green dots indicate 6-10 applications. And the two blue dots show our largest number of applicants have been based in India and the UK. I should say that many of the UK-based applicants propose research into contexts in Global South countries and often in collaboration with local researchers.

At one of our panel meetings last year, we were talking about the trends that have emerged from all the applications we've looked at so far and what they might say about the interests and needs in terms of dictionary resources in the kinds of settings and countries the awards focus on. That was the initial spark for the talk and sent me off looking back through our records of past applications and trying to classify them by theme.

I selected three main themes to talk about, namely:

• research into dictionary resources to support (sometimes highly) multilingual contexts
• resources aimed at learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
• inclusive resources targeted at learners for whom traditional dictionaries are not accessible.

 

 

As you can see from the chart, all three groups account for a significant proportion of applications. Inclusive resources appear to be quite a small group, but as we'll see, this is a theme that actually covers quite a few projects that aren't immediately flagged as obviously 'inclusive' so is much more widespread as the stats here suggest. The remainder of the proposals cover a huge range of themes and types, including quite a large chunk that I chose not to focus on for this particular paper. Many proposals, including a number of successful ASHDRA projects, have been in the broad area of dictionary skills, either focusing on how learners are already using dictionaries or looking at ways to improve the teaching of dictionary skills. I didn't include these in this particular talk, which remember was for a lexicography conference, simply because they perhaps sit more in the ELT sphere than in nuts and bolts lexicography.

I should, of course, acknowledge at this point that the awards only cover a certain type of lexicographical research and interests, specifically with their focus on ELT, so they don't necessarily reflect the very many other areas of lexicography going on out there.

In my next post, I'll dive into a world of multi-layered linguistic patchworks and examples of dictionary resources designed to help learners and teachers to navigate them.

Euralex 2024, Croatia

After 25 years of working in dictionaries, I recently I attended my first ever lexicography conference, the Euralex Conference held in Cavtat, Croatia (8-12 Oct). That might seem a bit surprising, but comes down to a number of factors about the nature of lexicography and lexicography conferences.

Why was it my first lexicography conference?

Primarily, it's because the kind of lexicography I do, working as a freelancer for UK commercial dictionary publishers is a bit of an anomaly in the world of lexicography. In many countries and for many languages other than English, lexicography is something carried out largely by academics attached to universities and language institutes, and funded by governments and grants from places like the EU keen to support those countries' linguistic and cultural heritage. So, many of the conference presentations were much less about the kind of practical, jobbing lexicography that I do and instead were papers reporting on academic research, often in very niche, theoretical areas.

At the reception on the first evening, I found myself chatting to Dirk Geeraerts, a very eminent name in the field and one of the plenary speakers - whose name, thankfully, I did recognize despite my incredibly patchy knowledge of academic lexicography! I was explaining my background and commenting that I didn't even understand many of the talk titles in the programme. He responded that it was probably all stuff I did know about but I just didn't recognize the terminology. He turned out to be spot on.

Not a bad spot for a coffee break!

So, why was I there?

Unlike the ELT conferences I typically go to, there was no chance of me being sponsored by a publisher to speak and there were almost no publishing contacts there for me to network with and potentially pick up new work. All reasons why, as a freelance lexicographer working on commercial dictionaries, I'd never been to a lexicography conference before. My "in" came, instead, via my role with the AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA), which are, as the name suggests, directly involved in dictionary research. The Hornby Trust was one of the conference sponsors, they sponsored the Hornby Lecture, this year by the fabulous Kory Stamper, and the current ASHDRA awardees presented their research (remotely online) in a slot at the event which, this year, I chaired.

Kory Stamper giving the Hornby Lecture

 
Was it useful?

In a very general sense, it was useful to give me a feel for the wider field. I'd been kind of aware of the differences I mentioned above, but meeting lexicographers and researchers from other countries and languages has crystallized just how different their worlds are from mine.

With my ASHDRA hat on, it's given me a better sense of what dictionary research looks like, and the norms and expectations of the field. As Dirk predicted, I had quite a few aha moments where I realized that some concept or theory or framework that I'd never heard of and sounded incredibly fancy was actually something I already knew about and use pretty much daily but without knowing the relevant label! And of course, it was a chance to spread the ASHDRA message and publicize the awards.

On a more personal level, I met lots of interesting people and it was been fun getting into some incredibly nerdy, niche conversations about the intricacies of dictionary compilation, corpus tools, and, inevitably, the impact of AI and LLMs on the field. Most of the new contacts I've made are unlikely to lead to future work, just because they work in such very different arenas, but one or two could potentially result in the odd offshoot which could be interesting.

Good to meet the team behind Sketch Engine, the corpus software I use.

As most of my trip was self-funded, it was an incredibly costly week. I decided to go at the start of the year when work was more stable and my finances were less precarious. More recently, it's felt like an outlay I could ill afford (and one which came out of my personal savings), but seeing as it was all booked, there was no point in feeling resentful and I tried to draw the positives out of it. Not least of those was the opportunity to visit beautiful Croatia. As is often the case with conferences, I spent much of my time inside windowless conference rooms, but I did have a free day at the start of the week to visit Dubrovnik and I grabbed a free afternoon to swim in the warm, crystal-clear waters of the Adriatic, so I really mustn't grumble!

Dubrovnik Old Town

 

 

The sparkling, crystal-clear Adriatic

 

Cavtat

 

 

 

The Adam Kilgarriff Memorial hike