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.

D is for Dictionary

Last week, the AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) panel got together to discuss the proposals submitted for this year’s awards. We had a fantastic batch of submissions from all across the globe and covering a really wide range of topics and ELT contexts.

 

One thing that seemed to stand out though was that almost 25% of applications were rejected simply because they didn’t involve dictionaries … which given these are dictionary research awards is kind of key.

From my notes ...

… and L is for lexicographic resource

It’s clear that a few of the proposals were ones that people had put together and submitted to various funding bodies, so maybe they were just chancing it with ASHDRA and hoping their topic was “close enough”. In most cases though, I think the confusion has arisen around our use of the term “lexicographic resources”.

The word dictionary obviously appears in the title of the awards, and we often talk about dictionary-related research, but in some of the criteria for applications, we also mention research related to lexicographic resources. We use the term to get away from the idea that projects have to involve what we think of as a typical dictionary, i.e. a comprehensive A-Z resource covering “all” words and set out in a traditional style and format. We’re throwing our net slightly wider than that to include different types of dictionaries, provided they’re aimed at ELT users. In fact, as I’ve explained in a previous post, the idea of creating a complete dictionary (of any kind) is really outside the scope of these awards, so we tend to encourage researchers to focus on a smaller-scale, pilot project to fully research and trial an idea as proof of concept (or MVP, minimum viable product, as one applicant phrased it this year). Those smaller-scale dictionary-like resources might be monolingual or bilingual, they might focus on a specific area of vocabulary (we’ve had projects on Medical English and English for Science), they might be more of a glossary to support a particular course, or they could be picture-based dictionaries. A project could also potentially branch out into dictionaries of collocations or idioms or synonyms or metaphors or phrasal verbs, etc.

What all of these resources have in common, though, is that no matter their format, focus, or scope, they should be primarily a reference resource.

What they are not is a set of general classroom (or self-study) activities to teach vocabulary, what you might term "lexical resources", and which is what many of this year's unsuccessful applications were focused around.

Is there enough ‘research’ in your research proposal?

The AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) are entering their fifth year in 2024. As new batches of dictionary-related research proposals come in each year, new issues crop up for us to discuss on the ASHDRA panel. I’ve previously written about over-ambitious dictionary development projects here.

Recently, we met up ahead of the 2024 call for proposals going out at the start of February and one of the talking points that came out of last year’s submissions was the question of what constitutes ‘research’.

We welcome any research angle that relates to dictionaries in English language teaching. One popular theme, though, involves developing new lexicographic resources in some form, especially to target the needs of a particular group of learners who are currently under-served. Targeting a need is a valid aim for a piece of research, but in some cases, we found that proposals were really materials development projects rather than research, i.e. the applicant had essentially already decided what kind of resource they wanted to create and just wanted funding to develop it.  And that’s just not what the awards are about.

So, what do we mean by ‘research’? According to the call for proposals, we define research as “original investigation undertaken in order to gain and extend knowledge and understanding” – but what does that look like in practice?

Researching the need:

Many applicants already have a clear idea of what gap they think needs to be filled, often based on their own teaching experience. That makes a great starting point, but is it enough? Could you find out more about exactly what issues your learners have with existing dictionary resources? Are they actually turning to dictionaries at all or just googling their language queries? What kinds of things do they find problematic? What would they find more helpful?  

Is your planned resource going to target learners exactly like your own students (same age, same level, same educational context, same L1/country/culture) or do you want to appeal to a wider audience? If so, how much do you know about the needs of that wider group of learners? If, for example, you work mainly in university-level EAP, you may be used to higher-level learners or those who are majoring in English, so are linguistically-minded and motivated. They will have a very different profile (and needs and skills) from the average high-school student who may not be interested in language at all and just wants quick fixes to get them through. Can you approach other teachers to draw on their experiences?

By investigating these kinds of questions (through questionnaires, interviews, focus groups or activities to find out about dictionary usage behaviours and needs), you might find that some of your initial intuitions were correct, but you might also turn up things you hadn’t considered and that might significantly shape what you do next.

Also, before you jump in feet first, have you thoroughly investigated what other published resources are available? Does the resource you’re planning actually already exist or perhaps, something similar to it? There’s no point in reinventing the wheel when you could learn from others. Make sure you thoroughly research and review what’s already available. Even if what you find isn’t exactly right for your target group, there may be elements you can draw on, especially if you don’t have past lexicography experience.

 ⚠️ A word of warning here: although it’s helpful to draw on already published dictionaries for inspiration; for style, layout, what information to include, etc.:

• Remember that published dictionaries are subject to copyright so while they can provide a helpful guide, you shouldn’t just copy definitions for your own use without permission.
• Make sure you draw on a relevant resource for your audience. Don’t imitate the style of definitions from a reference dictionary aimed at L1 speakers of English, especially not a dictionary of record such as the OED or Merriam-Webster, if you’re writing for EFL.

Research during your initial design phase:

Developing any dictionary-style resource will likely involve some form of corpus research – investigating the meaning and usage of lexical items, sourcing authentic example sentences – these things are a lexicographer’s bread and butter.

But will you be using corpus tools in a novel way to research the language going into your dictionary entries? Will you build your own corpus, perhaps in a specialized area? Maybe, like previous ASHDRA researcher, Chinh Ngan Nguyen Le, you’ll use a novel approach to analysis. She used collocation searches to establish the key senses of polysemous semi-technical medical terms and used the results to create visual representations of each term.

When you’ve created your first few draft entries, you could get some informal pre-trial feedback, perhaps from a handful of colleagues. Is there anything they think you’ve missed out? Anything that’s unclear or potentially confusing? You could design up a couple of different entry layouts to find out which format they prefer. It’s easier to iron out any problems early on before you’ve done too much work.

(Action) Research and development:

Once you have a set of draft entries, then an action research approach works well in this context to trial your material. 

That might involve recruiting groups of learners (your target end users) or it might be more appropriate for teachers to trial the resource in the classroom.

One of the keys to effective trialling is making sure you’re going to get enough detailed feedback that you can then act on to improve on your first draft. A handful of general feedback questions might just elicit rather vague, polite responses and give you little to work with. It’s important to design your trial carefully, to think about how to collect feedback and also make sure you leave enough time for it. Again, you could use questionnaires, interviews or focus groups. If your materials are being trialled in class, is it possible to observe or video the lesson to see for yourself not just how the students react to the materials, but also how the teachers make use of them? In one recent ASHDRA project, for example, the researcher found that despite training sessions with teachers ahead of the trail, in practice, the teachers tended to revert to their familiar teaching style and didn’t fully make use of the new resource as planned.

Once you’ve got your feedback and used it to redesign and improve your resource – or possibly any accompanying teacher’s guide - then you ideally need to go through the same process again. A second trial will tell you whether you’ve managed to get your resource spot-on or whether there’s still some tweaking needed.

Where your main research elements come will, of course, come down to the exact nature of your project, but the key thing to bear in mind is that just putting your existing ideas into practice doesn’t constitute research on its own. You need to investigate something and to come up with results and findings at the end of the process. And remember, it’s often the things that didn’t work that tell us more than those that went smoothly.

Mundane language change

When I talk about language change and the need to keep dictionaries up-to-date with current language usage, people tend to immediately start talking about new words, and especially trending new coinages that they may have come across in the media, the likes of wokefishing or quiet quitting. But actually a huge amount of language change is much subtler and much more mundane.

Yesterday, I was looking into the noun form, in the sense of an application form or an entry form for a competition. Looking at different learner's dictionary definitions, I found a split between those which still describe it as a piece of paper to be written on, what we might now call a hard copy (a retronym) and those that have shifted to the more neutral description of a document which implies that it could be a piece of paper or in a digital format, maybe online. And of course, the word document itself has shifted and stretched in the same way.

You probably hadn't even noticed that the concept of a form, that always used to be a piece of paper, has slowly morphed to encompass digital and online formats too without us feeling the need for a new word - in the same way, for example, that we distinguish between a letter and an email.

A lot of language change is similarly undramatic. Words slowly shift from one usage to something slightly different or stretch seemlessly to encompass new concepts. As lexicographers, we have to be alert to these shifts, to gently tweak definitions to keep them current, and edit examples to reflect contemporary usage - in this case, likely showing examples that refer to both paper forms and digital ones.

Why isn’t the Wordle word in the dictionary?

Yesterday, I had a rare fail on Wordle … and it seems so did a lot of other people judging by the uproar on Twitter. 

Interestingly, I was slightly less indignant than most as the correct answer, parer, seemed like a perfectly reasonable word to me. In fact, and you’ll just have to believe me on this, it was one I’d thought of trying. It’s a tool you use to pare fruit, vegetables, or cheese, usually a small knife or a peeler. What surprised me more was that it doesn’t appear as an entry in any of the major online dictionaries – if you type it in, you either get nothing or redirected to the entry for the verb, pare. I also notice as I type this post, my spellcheck is underlining it as an unrecognized word too.

Intrigued, and slightly doubting my own intuitions, my next port of call was a corpus search. It turns out it isn’t exceptionally common, and it’s difficult to get exact stats because of noise (names, foreign words, etc.), but there are certainly plenty of examples of usage out there, mostly in recipes and adverts for knife sets.

So why isn’t the word in any of the dictionaries? How did we miss it? Dictionary editors do regularly check for new words to add to a dictionary, especially when they’re compiling new editions. It isn’t an exact science though. New coinages and buzzwords jump out and get noted down. Sometimes words get noticed and noted by lexicographers when they’re working on an entry for another word. Several online dictionaries also have facilities for users to add suggested new words. Old, but relatively rare words though are easily missed.

But has parer actually been missed?

Learner’s dictionaries, of course, focus on the more high-frequency words that are likely to be most useful to learners of the language, so parer would be unlikely to feature anyway. And the free online versions of general reference dictionaries aren’t always based on the most comprehensive version of that publisher’s dictionaries. So, you won’t, for example, find the full OED available for free online, it’s a subscription service. Although, in fact, you don’t even have to go to the full OED to find parer. The entry below, in which parer appears at least as a run-on if not a headword, is from the Oxford Dictionary of English, a slightly less weighty, single-volume dictionary. Similarly, I found it in an old print version of The American Heritage College Dictionary I have on my shelves.

 

Oxford Dictionary of English, 3e

So, I went back to online sources and found that if you scroll down to the second entry for pare on dictionary.com, which has recently taken on data from Oxford Dictionaries, you do find it hidden away there too. 

So, before you exclaim that a word isn’t in the dictionary, perhaps you need to consider which dictionary you’re looking in and how much you can reasonably expect to get for free online.