Hornby, Albert Sidney

The son of a publishing agent. During the First World War he served in the Royal Navy . Then he graduated from University College London (1922). In the years 1924-1942. taught English in Japan, first at Oita at the Higher Commercial School (now Oita University ), and since 1934 in Tokyo, as a professor at two local higher schools and an employee of the Institute for Research in Teaching English ( IRET ), founded by Harold Palmer . Since 1936 he edited the bulletin of the institute. Together with coauthors, E.V. Geitenby and Harold Wakefield, published in 1940 in Japan the Dictionary of Expressions and Syntax of the English Language ( Eng. The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary ).

Immediately after the Pearl Harbor Attack, Hornby was interned with other Europeans and was soon expelled from Japan. Returning to the UK, he joined the British Council and was sent to teach at Tehran University . In 1945, he returned to London, worked for some time at the headquarters of the British Council, and in 1946 he began to edit and publish the English Language Teaching magazine, intended primarily for English teachers outside the UK, especially in Third World countries.

In 1948, a revised edition of a dictionary published in Japan was published by Oxford University Press as the Dictionary of Modern English for Students "( English A Learner's Dictionary of Current English ); This dictionary has been reprinted and used many times to this day. Since 1950, Hornby has completely focused on the creation of dictionaries and study guides. He devoted the main attention to stable turnovers and ways of connecting words in a language; this section of teaching English is reflected in the textbook “A Guide to Designs of English and Their Use” ( English A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English ; 1954, 1992 Russian translation under the title “Designs and Turns of the English Language”) and in the methodological manual for teachers "Teaching of Service Words and Phrase Structures" ( Eng. The Teaching of Structural Words and Sentence Patterns ; 1959-1962).

In 1961, Hornby founded his own private foundation ( English AS Hornby Educational Trust ), which began to receive more money from the sale of his textbooks; the main activity of the fund was the issuance of grants to foreign teachers of English to improve their skills in the UK ^[2] .