ASHDRA Dictionary Research Awards 2024

Five years of ASHDRA:
The AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) have now reached their fifth year and the 2024 call for proposals is now open.

A review:
Last month, the ASHDRA panel met up in London for one of our regular meetings. As well as planning for the new call for proposals, it was a chance to review how things are going. This included looking back at the proposals we received last year to discuss how well they fitted with the kind of projects we’re looking to fund. In previous years, one of the issues that had come up was over-ambitious proposals – an issue I wrote about here. This year, several of the proposals were essentially requests to fund the development of dictonary resources, but without a strong enough research element to them – I’ve looked into just what we mean by ‘research’ in more detail over on my blog.

A newsletter:
With five years’ worth of projects now under our belts, it felt like a good time to catch up with all the ASHDRA ‘alumni’ there have been so far – a total of eleven projects, completed and on-going. So I put together a newsletter which was sent out to everyone, inviting them to get in touch with their news. I’ll be reformatting that as a blog post soon, including news of two PhDs successfully completed, and one embarked on.

Plans for 2024:
This year, I’ll be speaking about the ASHDRA awards and some of the exciting insights that have come out of ASHDRA projects so far at the IATEFL Conference in Brighton in April – watch out for more news about my session nearer the time. I’m also planning on going along to the Euralex Conference in October in Croatia, for which the Hornby Trust is one of the sponsors. As in previous years, there will be a session at the conference in which ASHDRA researchers present their research. With such an international reach, these will take the form of video presentations which I hope to introduce at the event, possibly along with some form of Q&A (yet to be decided). It’ll also be a chance to meet up with the Hornby speaker, who this year is Kory Stamper, an American lexicographer who I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently and who, I’m sure, will be a great speaker.

BAAL Vocab SIG Conference, Nottingham

Last month, I was invited to give one of the plenaries at the BAAL Vocab SIG conference in Nottingham – that’s the British Association for Applied Linguistics Vocabulary Special Interest Group, so academic researchers in the field of vocabulary and vocabulary learning. The theme of the conference was the interface between research and classroom practice, so I came up with a talk entitled Lexicography: research, compile, repeat.

I spoke about how the work of a lexicographer involves both primary corpus research into language that then gets translated directly into a dictionary entry. I talked about some of the research questions I formulate about each word, how I go about researching them, how I analyze the results, then crucially, how I have to bear in mind the end user when deciding what to include in the final entry, what to leave out and how to present it. After nearly 25 years working in lexicography, it’s a process I barely think about, but it’s something that most people know little about.

The Vocab SIG provided an engaged and lively audience, with lots of questions in the Q&A that spilled over into dinner. It was fun to mingle with a slightly different vocab crowd and to find out more about the kind of things they’re working on over in academia. I also met lots of very friendly, welcoming people – thanks for inviting me!

IATEFL 2023: Harrogate

If last year’s IATEFL conference in Belfast was a bit of a wary affair with facemasks and uncertainty about how to behave, this year’s event in Harrogate last week was just one big, friendly hug! It was a full-on exhausting 4 days for me, with two sessions to present and so many people to catch up with.

I started off on Monday with the MaWSIG PCE, a full day of sessions aimed at materials writers. I was up last with the final workshop of the day: “What can you learn from a lexicographer?”. I walked through the process of compiling an entry for a learner’s dictionary, highlighting various issues to think about as I went along that are (hopefully) relevant to wider materials writing. I really enjoy speaking to an audience of my direct peers because it means I can jump right into the nitty-gritty details in a way that I can’t when speaking to a wider, more mixed audience. Big thanks to everyone for playing along at the end of a long day.

Fessing up to the extent of my dictionary habit!

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday trying to catch a few sessions – in-between being waylaid for hugs and chats – including Jon Hird talking about the ‘real’ language of opinions, Penny Hands exploring native-speakerism in ELT publishing and Tyson Seburn challenging my ideas about inclusion and inclusive language. I also got to meet up with one of the ASHDRA researchers who I worked with on editing her research report, Chinh Ngan Nguyen Le, as she presented her research into a visual dictionary of semi-technical medical vocabulary. It was great to finally meet her in person and the ideas in her presentation still came across as fresh and innovative, even though I’d read through her report many times. You can read about her research on the Hornby website.

Then on Thursday, I was speaking on behalf of Collins about the pros and cons of assigning CEFR level labels to vocabulary and how teachers, syllabus designers and materials writers can use the level labels in the the new edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (both in print and online) as a tool to guide decisions about vocab selection while at the same time applying a good dose of common sense, professional judgement to those choices too. There’ll hopefully be a follow-up blog post at some point, so watch out for that. My session was in the main auditorium which feels like an enormous space to fill, so thanks to everyone who came along and made it feel a bit less empty! I spent over an hour afterwards chatting to people, which I think is probably the most satisfying part of any presentation.

It was an exhausting, but also enlivening week full of people, chat and inspiration. I’m happy to be back at my desk and ticking along quietly again, but I’m already looking forward to next year’s IATEFL in Brighton.

Making ASHDRA more accessible

It’s that time of year again when the A.S.Hornby Trust Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) are launching their call for proposals; reaching out to anyone with a special interest in dictionaries and ELT who has an idea for a research project.

This year, we’ve been trying to make the information available about the awards a bit more accessible by adding more information about already completed projects, including short, one-page summaries that give you a flavour of the type of research we fund. I’ve written a bit about the reasoning behind the summaries and the process of putting them together over on my blog.

So, if you’re interested in exploring any aspect of dictionaries in the world of ELT, how they’re used, how effective or accessible they are in different contexts and for different groups of users, how they fit in with classroom practice, or maybe you have an idea for a novel dictionary-style resource (it doen’t have to be a full-blown dictionary!) then go over and visit the ASHDRA website. As well as the summaries of past projects, you’ll find the full research reports if you want more detail, there’s information about ongoing projects and, of course, the call for proposals and application form.

Focus on learner’s dictionaries: a new paper for OUP

Earlier this year, OUP asked me to write a focus paper for them about using learner’s dictionaries in ELT. Unlike the position paper I wrote previously about the Oxford 3000, which is fairly long and detailed, their series of focus papers are designed to be short, accessible, and practical.

Here’s a link to a short video I made explaining what it’s about – click for video

You can download the paper from the OUP website – scroll to the bottom of the page to find it. You’ll need to register to download, but it’s free.

Still alive and ticking along

I’ve just spotted that my last post here was back in April! It kind of sounds like I haven’t been doing much this year, doesn’t it? Well, I have been busily working away, but I’ve mostly been occupied on a long-term project. One of the things about freelancing is you can never talk about what you’re currently working on – because of confidentiality – only the stuff that’s already gone public. So, it’s easy to end up with long stretches where you appear to go quiet.

Today though I do have something new to share … and actually something I forgot to mention back in May too. This year’s IATEFL conference took place in Belfast at the end of May. It was my first in-person event in forever and a fabulous opportunity to catch up with lots of ELT friends, colleagues and contacts. I also had a mini-adventure travelling overland (and sea) to get there without flying.

I gave a talk about some of the research and writing I did for the updated edition of Work on Your Idioms (Collins, 2021), entitled Reading between the proverbials: The role of idioms in ELT. It was a fun topic and I never tire of talking about the corpus research that goes into some of the projects I get to work on. I had a great audience who enthusiastically joined in shouting out (mild) swear words on cue – thanks to everyone who came along and made it a fun experience! And thanks too to Collins for sending out copies of the book to everyone who couldn’t get their hands on one on the day.

After the session, several people asked me if I was going to write it up. I didn’t get round to a blog post at the time, but I have written an article based on the talk for Modern English Teacher magazine that’s just been published in their Sept/Oct edition. If you’re a subscriber, you can find it here: Idioms in ELT: the icing on the cake or something to steer clear of?

Modern English Teacher, Sept/Oct 2022

Okay, I promise I’ll stop now with the idiom-based titles!

Exploring synonyms: Collins IGCSE ESL

Last year, I got to work on a really interesting short project. It was contributing a section to the workbook to accompany a new edition of an IGCSE English as a Second Language course for Collins.

Feedback from teachers on previous editions had asked for more work on synonyms, so my brief was to design and write a new 25-page section focusing on synonyms. We came up with a simple format that involved selecting three sets of 3-5 synonyms linked to the topic/vocabulary of each unit of the student’s book. We started off with definitions of each word, adapted from a Collins COBUILD dictionary, followed by two activities. The activities vary, depending on the nature of the synonym set, but generally the first is a set of questions that try to get at the similarties and differences between the words. For example, in the set below – prevent, avoid, stop – the questions focus on whether or not the event actually happens. The second exercise is a more conventional practice activity; a gap-fill, matching activity, etc.

It was interesting to think about what the differences were between each set of words and how to convey those differences as simply as possible. Inevitably, even though it wasn’t strictly in the brief, I ended up doing some corpus searches for each set to identify typical contexts, collocations and patterns of usage for each word. This fed into the example sentences and also led to exercises and tip boxes that focused on things like collocation, lexicogrammar (e.g. countable and uncountable nouns), colligation (grammar patterns) and register.

It was one of those short but fun writing projects and as exciting as ever to get a shiny new book in the post!

Hornby Trust Dictionary Research Awards 2022

My professional highlight of the past year has definitely been my work with the A.S. Hornby Trust as a member of the expert panel for their Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA). I joined the panel towards the end of 2020 and have thoroughly enjoyed working with my fellow panel members – Michael Rundell, Sue Maingay, Hilary Nesi and Richard Smith – over the past year, even though, sadly, we’ve only been able to meet via Zoom so far.

Over the year, we’ve put together and publicized the call for proposals, read and discussed the new research proposals that came in last April, had contacts with potential future awardees, and with researchers already working on projects. In September, four ASHDRA researchers presented at the Euralex Online Conference, for which I helped to moderate the Q&A.

Euralex 2021

Over the past month, I’ve been working with several awardees who’ve completed their research to edit their reports for publication on the Hornby website – you can find links to the reports here. Unsurprisingly, many of the projects have been adversely affected by the pandemic, with planned classroom visits cancelled and participants unable to meet up. This has led to adjustments and in some cases, creative online alternatives, and several of the projects have had to be shortened with aims scaled back. I think they have, nonetheless, produced some really interesting results.

Agus Riadi, working in Indonesia, combined ideas around translanguaging and making use of the linguistic landscape to create and trial sample entries for a pictorial, multilingual dictionary to use in English language lessons. Traditionally, students have only been allowed to use English and Bahasa Indonesia (the official national language) in the classroom. His innovative dictionary entries brought in translations in local languages as well as images of language used on signs from the area around the school to try and engage students more in the language learning process. The initial feedback was dramatic with students getting incredibly excited both at recognizing the local signs and also at being given permission to use their mother tongue in the classroom. Even after the project ended, they continued to bring up signs they’d seen and possible translations with their class teacher – definitely a positive sign of increased engagement and motivation!

Coming at dictionary research from a completely different angle, Yan Yan Yeung, based in the UK, explored how Chinese students studying at a British university used a popular Chinese-English dictionary app. As well as turning up the kind of issues that previous research into dictionary use has uncovered – such as users not looking beyond the first translation offered – her research highlighted how error-strewn the app was, the overconfidence of the participants in their own knowledge and linguistic judgments, and their overconfidence in the reliability of the app. Definitely lots of food for thought for ELT teachers and an issue I don’t think can be overemphasized.

More reports will be appearing on the website in the coming weeks and now we’ve come full circle with the call for proposals for this year’s awards just launched. If you have a special interest in dictionaries in ELT and an idea for a research project, take a look at the website for more information about previous projects and this year’s call for proposals.

Work on Your Idioms/Phrasal Verbs

This morning, I received shiny new copies of two books I worked on at the beginning of the year; Work on Your Idioms and Work on Your Phrasal Verbs, both published by Collins.

They’re second editions of books originally written by Cheryl Pelteret, Jamie Flockhart and Sandra Anderson published back in 2012, suitable for either self study or classroom use. I was asked to work on new editions, together with Penny Hands, to add new material and make changes in two main areas.

Updating

Both books cover the most frequently-used idioms and phrasal verbs in English. So, one of the first questions we had to ask was whether the frequency lists that the first editions were based on might have changed in what was probably 10 years since the initial research. Working together with the in-house corpus team at Collins, we reviewed the lists for each book and identified a number of items that had declined in use (in some cases, quite dramatically) and found replacements that had pushed their way up the rankings.

We also cast an eye over all the material with a view to contemporary social norms and lifestyles, and Penny did a fantastic job of sourcing what we hope is an interesting, useful, and diverse set of new images.

Extending practice

Each of the titles is organized into 25 thematic units made up of 4 pages. In the first editions, the first two pages consisted of definitions and examples of the target phrasal verbs or idioms, followed by two pages of practice exercises. Feedback from users had suggested that they’d like more practice, so with some clever redesigning, the second edition has all the definitions in a neat table on the first page of each unit, freeing up an extra page per unit for more practice.

I was able to make use of this extra practice space to take learners beyond activities focusing predominantly on meaning and form. For the phrasal verbs, we added more work on things like collocations and grammar patterns, and for the collocations, we were able to give more space to looking at usage, context and connotation, and also variation in form.

Find out more …

I’ll be writing in more detail about the books, some of the research we did, and the changes we made in a couple of upcoming posts on the Collins ELT blog – so keep an eye out for those. Or take a look at the books on the Collins website here – Work on Your Phrasal Verbs and Work on Your Idioms.

Oxford Discover Futures

Last year, I was involved in writing for a new series of coursebooks by OUP aimed at teenagers called Oxford Discover Futures. I wrote ‘Writing workshop’ sections for the two highest level student books; level 5/B2+ and level 6/C1. I’ve just received a copy of level 5 and level 6 is due out later in the year.

I was asked to come in for the higher levels, in part, because of my background in EAP. The two highest levels are aimed at students at the end of high school, so are starting to look ahead to the kind of writing skills needed in higher education. Each six-page workshop introduces and practises a different text type and in these two, we looked at summaries and academic essays.

Whilst the subskills we wanted to practise were very familiar to me, finding appropriate topics as a focus proved to be more of a challenge. Because coursebook series are often written more-or-less in level order, the writers of the highest levels always get last dibs on topics, with editors keen not to repeat too closely themes that have been covered in other books. Which can sometimes prove really challenging! After lots of discussions with my editor, for level 5, we finally settled on a broad theme of ‘learning’ with two texts that provided the focus of summary writing tasks – one about what we learn from siblings as we’re growing up and the second about lifelong learning.

For me, it was quite a short project and just a small contribution to the series, but a really interesting writing challenge.