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Description
The AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) have been running since 2019 and to date have received 160 applications from 47 countries. The awards fund dictionary research within English language teaching (ELT) and especially target projects in low-resource contexts. Thus, a large proportion of applications (although not all) are from researchers working in the Global South. This paper reviews three key trends that have emerged across those applications and suggests areas of particular focus in lexicography in these regions, with examples of ASHDRA-funded projects in each area.
Multilingual resources including local languages
The most significant trend to emerge among ASHDRA research proposals has been interest in bi- and multilingual reference resources for minority, local languages. Many countries of the Global South have a multi-layered linguistic patchwork in which people speak a local language at home as their L1, then learn a regional or national language as their L2 and lingua franca. English (effectively their L3) is commonly taught from primary school but typically via the L2. In one such project, Riadi (2021) created a multilingual dictionary for learners in schools in an underdeveloped region of West Borneo, Indonesia. The small-scale resource was based around photographs of the linguistic landscape (adverts, shop signs, etc.) near to the participating schools. The entry for each target word included equivalents in English, Bahasa Indonesia (the national language), Pontianak (a regional language), and Ketapang (a local language and most students' mother tongue). The resulting dictionary provided both a classroom resource enabling students to translate directly between English and their home language, something they had not previously done (or been encouraged to do) and also linked the English they were learning to their environment and lived experiences, something that classroom observation and feedback showed they found incredibly motivating.
Other projects (proposed and ongoing) have focused on communities in rural India who speak a local language at home, then learn English at school through the medium of a regional language, such as Kannada, or indigenous students in Mexico who speak Zapotec, a largely oral local language, as their home language but are schooled in Spanish, then are expected to learn English. In some cases, schoolteachers do not come from the local communities and so do not even share their students' L1. This puts those learners, who may already come from disadvantaged communities, at a further disadvantage. With an increasing interest in 'translanguaging' and the benefits of using learners' L1 as a resource in language teaching, some national Ministries of Education are encouraging the use of L1 in the ELT classroom. Such an approach is hard to implement, however, without relevant resources for both learners and teachers. Around 25% of ASHDRA applications have been to develop multilingual resources for contexts where none yet exist. These projects often come up against the further barrier that local languages may be largely oral and even where written forms exist, there may be low levels of literacy within the community. This has led to creative solutions such as the use of images and audio (see more below).
English for (very) Specific Purposes
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a well-established area of lexicography, but many published resources, such as dictionaries of Medical English or English for Engineering, are quite broad in scope and often geared toward typical students and teaching contexts in countries in the Global North. Despite the massive growth in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education globally, the differing needs of learners in the Global South remain under-researched (Sahan et al., 2021) and existing ESP resources may not always be relevant or accessible to learners in low-resource, sometimes low-bandwidth, contexts with specific English needs. Another theme among ASHDRA proposals has been the development of very specific resources to target the needs of particular groups of English learners, such as a dictionary of semi-technical vocabulary aimed at Vietnamese medical students (Le, 2022), an app for Omani physics undergraduates (Mathew & McCallum, 2024), or a resource for Indonesian mining engineering students learning to work with the industry standard software in English (Nurfitriah, forthcoming). With limited resources available, these projects are not necessarily full ESP dictionaries but resources with a scope and format targeted at the specific and immediate needs of learners.
Inclusive lexicographic resources
The final theme to emerge is the development of accessible resources for language learners who cannot easily access conventional dictionaries. This group includes learners with visual and hearing impairments. Two research projects due for completion in 2026 target, respectively, visually impaired students in Indonesian primary schools with a dictionary that includes both Braille and QR codes linked to audio (Karolina, forthcoming), and a project using sign language videos aimed at deaf learners in India (Zeshan, forthcoming). This category also includes learners with low levels of literacy. This overlaps with some of the projects under the first theme where local languages may be from a largely oral tradition, but also adult migrant and refugee learners who sometimes have low levels of literacy in their first language and who can more easily access English language resources with visual and/or audio components (such as O’Boyle, 2023, Oakey & Jones, forthcoming).
Trends: focusing on the local and specific
What the most innovative projects in all three areas have in common is that they take as their starting point the needs of learners in a specific context and often work in collaboration with learners and educators to develop a lexicographic resource that directly addresses those needs, working with limited resources in creative ways. While it has to be acknowledged that ASHDRA have a specific focus and the proposals received reflect this, it seems that they may indicate a more general trend in lexicography and the projects they fund may provide models which could be replicated elsewhere.