A Lexicon for ELT Professionals

A Lexicon for ELT Professionals

This lexicon provides 500+ headword entries and definitions of words and phrases that are either specific to ELT or have a specific meaning when used in the context of ELT. This handy reference has been compiled by lexicographer and linguist, Diane Nicholls who, in her own words, ‘can often be found wading up to my neck in words, trying to marshal them into some sort of order while secretly admiring their slipperiness’.

Diane created a 324,000-word corpus from the titles in the ELT Teacher 2 Writer list, then compared this corpus with two General English corpora to identify all the words and short phrases that are used significantly more frequently in ELT than in non-ELT-specific English. This list was subsequently supplemented with Diane’s personal knowledge of the area plus research with an online ELT publishing freelancers’ community.

Designed to sit on the desks of ELT professionals (teachers, materials writers, editors, designers, researchers, digital developers, software engineers), the lexicon covers the thematic areas of: assessment, language, materials and resources, methodology, organisations, pedagogy, pronunciation, publishing, skills and learning.

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Diane Nicholls

After a short period teaching English as a Foreign Language, then working as a technical and specialised translator, Diane worked as a freelance Lexicographer, ELT publishing project manager, materials developer, author and editor for 27 years. Alongside her ELT publishing projects, Diane was responsible for developing and managing the Cambridge Learner Corpus error annotation project and became increasingly involved in corpus analysis and research into the needs of learners of English, and the development of evidence-based learning and teaching materials, digital tools  and resources. More recently, she has been working on the application of Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning to the development of online tools for learners and teachers.