A major new project for the English language is to take the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) one stage further and create tools which will be at the heart of language teaching, materials development and assessment for many years to come.
The University of Cambridge has always been closely involved in the CEFR, both through Cambridge ESOL’s work with its ALTE (Association of Language Testers in Europe) partners in supporting the creation and implementation of the Framework, and Cambridge University Press in publishing it.
The Cambridge ESOL exams are an embodiment of the CEFR. A long-term and ongoing research project keeps Cambridge ESOL’s exams entwined tightly with the CEFR and its development.
“What the CEFR does not do is show what real language use actually looks like at each of those different levels. The new initiative, English Profile, is aiming to fill in the gaps for the English language”, says Dr Michael Milanovic (Chief Executive of Cambridge ESOL).
English Profile is using millions of examples of language produced by test takers around the world to develop reference level descriptions for each of the six levels from A1 to C2. The Profile is expected to be a crucial tool for language teaching, material development, assessment and research for the future.
A unique aspect of the project is the use of the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a repository of answers produced by candidates for the Cambridge ESOL examinations over nearly 15 years. To date, 85,000 scripts from 180 countries have been fed into the Corpus, providing researchers and test producers with 26 million words of English from learners all over the world. A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge will work with this and other material to develop the reference level descriptions.
As a result of the initial three years of the project, the English Profile project aims to produce reference materials combining electronic and printed resources. These will provide descriptions of the grammatical and lexical exponents of each of the levels of the CEFR, based on an unprecedented body of empirical research. The descriptions will be accompanied by written, video and audio examples of performances by learners with different first languages.
More information is available from www.EnglishProfile.org and updates can be received by emailing info@EnglishProfile.org