In this Issue

Letters to the Editor
Write to Us
Spread the Word
Back Issues

FEATURE
How professional do you
want to be?

COLUMNS

Language Interference
Romanian and English –
a mediated partnership

Focus on Language Study:
Introduction
Metaphor
UK version ¦ US version

New word of the month
New phrasal verbs

Corpora tips
The Web as corpus:
using media sites to present
new or unfamiliar words

Lindsay Clandfield

Lindsay Clandfield is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer. He has taught in Mexico, Spain, England, Canada and the Czech Republic. He currently lives in the south of Spain. He is a teacher trainer for Oxford TEFL, Barcelona and has spoken on practical aspects of teaching at conferences around Europe. Lindsay is also a main contributing author for onestopenglish, the Macmillan resource site for teachers, and is co-author with Philip Kerr of Straightforward, the new Macmillan course for adults and young adults.

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Philip Kerr

Philip is a teacher, teacher trainer and educational manager who lives and works in Brussels. Most of his time at the moment is devoted to the writing of educational materials and recent projects have included the coursebooks Inside Out (with Sue Kay and Vaughan Jones), Rising Star (with Luke Prodromou) and Straightforward (with Lindsay Clandfield). He runs workshops for teachers, lectures frequently and contributes to a number professional journals.

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Mairi MacDonald

I first became interested in learner's dictionaries more than 10 years ago while teaching English in Lithuania. I became a lexicographer with Cambridge University Press in 1999 and since then I have been involved in several ELT publications including Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, the CD-ROM versions of the Macmillan English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary as well as the Macmillan Schools Dictionary website.

I have contributed to several websites – writing articles, designing web pages as well as adapting and creating interactive activities and games.

I work from my home in Perthshire and most of my spare time is taken up with my baby son Aonghas (Gaelic for 'Angus') and walking my parents' border collie, Misty.

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Kerry Maxwell

Kerry has a first degree in computational linguistics and an MA in theoretical linguistics from the University of Manchester, specialising in syntactic theory.

For several years she worked as a researcher at Manchester and Essex universities, where in connection with European projects on machine translation, she was involved in computational lexicography, co-ordinating research in computational descriptions of compounds and collocations, and presenting her work in various international academic contexts.

In 1993 she joined Cambridge University Press as a lexicographer/editor and grammar consultant, and worked on a large number of Cambridge learner's dictionaries, including the English Pronouncing Dictionary, the Cambridge International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary in print and CD-ROM versions.

In June 2001 Kerry moved to York where she now works as a freelance editor/lexicographer and is involved in a range of dictionary and grammar projects.

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Elizabeth Potter

Like most people who write dictionaries for a living, I became a lexicographer by accident. After several years working in Italy and Scotland as an ELT teacher and course organiser, and as a translator and teacher of Italian, I was looking for a change. In 1990, a friend spotted a job ad for bilingual lexicographers at Longman. I applied and got the job, and discovered something I had never suspected – that dictionaries are written by people like me. After two years at Longman, I moved to COBUILD, where I worked on monolingual learner’s dictionaries. Since leaving COBUILD in 1999 to work freelance, I have contributed to a variety of monolingual and bilingual learner’s dictionaries, and I also write a weekly Web article on English.

When I’m not slaving over a hot dictionary entry, I like to spend my time gardening, and enjoying the company of my husband and two children. I also sing in a choir and go to yoga classes, though despite many years of trying I still can’t manage the lotus position.

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Mihaela H. Precup

I am a junior teaching assistant at the University of Bucharest, Romania. I have been teaching at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, the English Department, for five years now and most of my classes are on American literature and civilization. I also teach an American visual culture elective course, as well as English language classes. I manage the Language Centre of the Faculty, where I have also taught pre-intermediate and intermediate levels.

What is perhaps special (and sometimes defeating) about the language classes we teach at university level is that we are often in a position of persuading the students that they still need them and that they should regard them with as much seriousness as they do literature or cultural studies. Usually it's fun to dig up texts that they might find interesting and devise activities which might be useful to them in other classes too.

I am currently doing research on memory studies for my PhD in 20th century American literature and visual culture. This is something I would really love to have more time for, as well as for a thousand other things, such as my family and friends, and the many new things one comes across and finds worth discovering.

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I come from Hungary. I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Szeged in south-east Hungary where I also completed an English Language Teaching degree. I taught English as a foreign language in Hungary and in the Netherlands.

I am Managing Editor of the Macmillan Dictionaries series and was editor of the Macmillan English Dictionary Workbook. I am also one of the editors of the Macmillan English Dictionaries resource site.

I live in Amsterdam and frequently travel to the UK. I'm a keen but rather lazy runner. In my free time I enjoy playing squash, watching films and reading.

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