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  In
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COLUMNS
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Contributors |
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Mairi
MacDonald
Mairi taught English in Lithuania and Poland before returning to the UK to work in publishing. She has worked on several multimedia dictionary projects including the Macmillan English Dictionary on CD-ROM. Mairi works part-time as editor of History Online, a website aimed at secondary school teachers. The rest of her time is devoted to various ELT projects and developing learning materials for the web. |
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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 learners’ 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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Dr. Don R. McCreary (Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Delaware, 1984), Professor of English and Linguistics, works primarily in lexicography and applied linguistics, as well as ESOL. He edited DawgSpeak!, the dictionary of UGA student slang, (2001, 2003, 2nd ed.), which is on the English Department’s web page, www.english.uga.edu. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at two universities, the National University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur in 1991-1992, and Péter Pázmány Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary in 2001-2002; an Erlangen Exchange professor at the Federal University of Erlangen, Germany in 1997, and a Moss Fellow at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 1985. Dr. McCreary is the Associate Editor of the Japanese-English
Science and Engineering Dictionary (OHM, 1988), the English-Japanese
Science and Engineering Dictionary (OHM, 1993), and has authored many
articles on lexicography and Japanese applied linguistics in journals
such as the International Journal of Lexicography, Lexicographica,
Semiotica, and Language Sciences. He is also the co-author,
with Fredric Dolezal, of ‘Pedagogical Lexicography Today: A Critical
Bibliography on Learners’ Dictionaries with Special Emphasis on Language
Learners and Dictionary Users’ (Lexicographica Series Maior 96. Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999). He is on the Advisory Panel of the Macmillan
English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary at Macmillan. |
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Diane
Nicholls
I don’t know how or when I became a lexicographer, though I think I have always been a linguist. My first degree, in Russian and French at the University of Reading led on to a postgraduate diploma in technical and specialized translation from the Polytechnic of Central London. A long spell of working as a translator, freelance and in-house, brought me to the realization that my passion for languages lay in the individual words themselves rather than in any finished documents I might produce and that translating, while a great discipline, would never allow me the time to ‘enjoy’ the words. I returned to academic study and an Mlitt in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University. There I spent my time analysing and enjoying the language and style of the short stories of Anton Chekhov and wondering how I would ever manage to make a living using my language skills. Freelance work at Cambridge University Press provided the answer and my first non-user experience of dictionaries. It was through my work on False Friends for the Cambridge International Dictionary of English that I came into contact with the Acquilex project – an international computational lexicography project on multilingual lexical databases. Two years of working as a research assistant on Acquilex provided me with an excellent apprenticeship and finally sealed my fate (in career terms). Since the end of the Acquilex project in 1995 I have worked as a freelance linguist/lexicographer and revelled in the variety and flexibility this role offers. I have worked on highly commercial software development projects as far away as Silicon Valley in California, on academic research projects closer to home and in Hong Kong and the US and on a variety of dictionary publishing projects, including learner corpora, learners’ and native-speaker dictionaries and thesauruses (CUP, Bloomsbury, OUP, Macmillan). Among other things, I seem to have found a niche in developing and executing categorization and coding systems and can usually be found wading up to my neck in words, trying to marshal them into some sort of order while secretly admiring their slipperiness. Writing articles for the MED resource site provides me with an opportunity to get a few things off my linguistic chest and express some of my admiration for the things that words can do and the problems they can cause their users. I live in Hackney, London with my husband, Rory. |
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I have been active as a teacher, teacher trainer, author,
editor and consultant in the field of Language Teaching for more than
30 years. I began my career in my hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where I was a teacher of high school French and mathematics before moving
on to Harvard University, where I taught English as Second Language to
university personnel. Since 1981 I have been based in New York City, where I am Coordinator of Faculty Development at the Hunter College International English Language Institute of the City University of New York. I also lecture in the graduate programs in TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University from which I earned an M.Ed. degree in 1989. My publications include more than 40 textbooks and teacher reference books. My resource books for teachers include Cultural Awareness, Video in Second Language Teaching, and Video in Action. I am Series Editor of the ABC News ESL Video Library, ESL Director and Supervising Editor of the Hello, America multimedia ESL course, and co-author of That’s English, a telecourse produced by BBC English and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. I am also the primary author of the Environmental Education volume of the electronic journal Language and Civil Society published by the US Department of State. My most recent book, Film, a resource book for teachers, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. In addition to being a featured speaker at numerous educational conferences in the US and abroad, I have been a Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia, a Fulbright Lecturer in Chile, an Open Society Foundation Lecturer in Croatia, and a US–Spain Joint Committee Lecturer in Spain. As an Academic Specialist for the US Department of State, I have lectured in teacher education and development programs in Africa, Europe, the Far East, Latin America, and the Middle East. As a consultant, I have worked on projects for such organizations as Berlitz International, Children’s Television Workshop, Encyclopedia Britannica, Microsoft Corporation, and the World Bank. In my free time, I enjoy opera and classical music. I
also enjoy French literature and cinema and am a founding member and Vice
President of the Molière Society of New York. I like to visit Paris as
often (and for as long) as I can each year. |
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| Meet the Editor | ||||
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Kati
Sule
Kati was born in Hungary. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Szeged in south-east Hungary and also completed an ELT degree, writing her dissertation on the role of monolingual dictionaries in ELT. She taught English as a foreign language in Hungary and briefly in the Netherlands. Kati moved to the UK in 1998 and has worked as an ELT
editor since 1999. She has been involved in the Macmillan English Dictionary
project, focusing on the illustrations in the dictionary, and was editor
of the Macmillan English Dictionary
Workbook. She has also worked on the
CD-ROM edition of MED and is one of the editors of the Macmillan
English Dictionary resource site. |
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Cover photo © Getty Images, Inc. 2002
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