The English Profile Programme – an overview

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©UCLES 2008 – The contents of this publication may not be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holder. Welcome to issue 33 of Research Notes, our quarterly publication reporting on matters relating to research, test development and validation within Cambridge ESOL. This issue focuses on English Profile, a collaborative programme of research, consultation and publication, designed to enhance the learning, teaching and assessment of English worldwide. In this issue we describe how English Profile came about, its academic and institutional partners and its three research strands, with contributions from project partners and researchers from the growing number of English Profile Networks. In the introductory article, Svetlana Kurtes ˘ and Nick Saville describe the birth of English Profile, a programme rooted in – and building on – the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and other Council of Europe initiatives. They outline the approach to producing Reference Level Descriptions (RLD) begun by Cambridge ESOL and describe current research projects and the various events through which we disseminate research findings. Next, Angeliki Salamoura discusses how research data being collected for English Profile can be aligned to the CEFR. The next three articles describe work underway at Cambridge University where researchers are developing new and extending existing corpora in order to investigate criterial features at each proficiency level within the Corpus Linguistics research strand. Henriëtte Hendriks outlines a research agenda that links language acquisition research and computational approaches to the analysis of learner data, based on an enhanced version of the Cambridge Learner Corpus – Cambridge ESOL’s and Cambridge University Press’ unique written corpus. Caroline Williams describes the challenges that learner writing pose to an automatic parser, concentrating on English word order errors of Spanish and Chinese speakers. Theodora Alexopoulou then reports on the collection of written materials from classroom settings around the world to form new corpora to supplement the Programme’s existing learner data. We next focus on the Curriculum and Assessment research strand. Anthony Green reports on functional progression in English language teaching materials, based on a survey of documentation including test specifications and coursebooks. Radmila Bodric ˘ investigates the impact of a common European language policy on language teaching in the Serbian context, setting out what is expected of today’s teachers. Two English Profile Network members then consider culture-specific aspects of language which relate to the Language Pedagogy research strand. JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer compares persuasive texts written in