English Profile is a collaborative project, run jointly by a group of organisations with unrivalled knowledge and expertise in language education and assessment worldwide.
The group comprises British Council, Cambridge University Press, English UK, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (University of Cambridge), University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and the University of Luton.
Over a period of several years, the English Profile project will produce a set of Reference Level Descriptions for English, a ground-breaking research programme which will use the levels of the Common European Framework to define levels of proficiency in English more precisely and comprehensively than has been achieved before. The Profile will be a fundamental tool for language teaching, material development, assessment and research for many years to come.
The project will make use of the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a unique repository of material drawn from the answers produced by candidates for the Cambridge ESOL examinations over several years. A team of researchers will work with this and other material to develop the reference level descriptions. There will be numerous opportunities for researchers, teachers and other specialists in the ELT field to be involved with the project.
The English Profile project was launched at the British Council ELT Conference in Bologna, Italy and the IATEFL Annual Conference in Harrogate, UK. Following these events, interested professionals will be invited to join a mailing list that will be used to keep them informed as the project develops.
For more information: www.EnglishProfile.org
