Cambridge hosts fifth English Profile seminar
The Pitt Building in the centre of historic Cambridge was the venue for the fifth in the series of seminars which are shaping English Profile.
The seminar was a truly international event, with delegates representing countries as diverse as Montenegro, Taiwan and Japan.
Attendees were able to hear about the latest progress made with the research programme and define forthcoming priorities, including an international English Profile Conference for September 2009.
Delegates at February's English Profile Seminar at Cambridge's Pitt Building.
In the opening address, Chief Executive of Cambridge ESOL, Dr Michael Milonovic emphasised the remarkable collaborative nature of the project and the clearer picture that was emerging of the benefits that English Profile will deliver: “This project will enable us to better understand the levels of proficiency that we are dealing with and to put what we do on a more experimental, more empirical footing, and a more systematic and detailed understanding of the learning environment.”
Tuesday February 5
Nick Saville and Project Co-ordinator Dr Svetlana Kurtes presented an overview of the project goals and progress to date.
Key project goals included, filling the need that exists for descriptions of the English C levels, distinguishing C Levels from B levels and determining the criterial differences between each level in grammatical, lexical and functional terms.
Priorities for the way forward were identified as.
- Research and development work
- Setting up and external network of collaborators
- Promotional activities
Dr Tony Green’s presentation developed the theme of the need to differentiate C levels. In his paper, Functional Progression at the C level of the CEFR, Dr Green outlined the study carried out as a first step in specifying how learners at the C level are expected to be able to use the English language.
Dr Green said that by building on this study it should be possible to draft a set of functional categories that define the salient features of the C levels with respect to communicative functions: ‘Achieving a scaleable set of descriptors for the English C level RLDs [Reference Level Descriptions] will clearly be a challenging task for the EPP consortium…This paper represents a first and necessarily tentative step, but one that will now enable us to begin the empirical work”
Prof John Hawkins was just one of the leading experts on language and language learning who made presentations to the English Profile Seminar.In the Q&A session following Dr Green’s presentation, Council of Europe observer Dr John Trim made some useful contributions about how compromises will have to be made in describing the levels, between the kind of technical precision needed by academics and other professionals in linguistics and the clarity needed for the descriptions to be useful to teachers and learners.
In Tuesday’s final session, Prof. John Hawkins outlined some of the work that has already started on UCLES-RCEAL funded research projects. In particular, he looked at some of the work carried out on morpho-syntactic errors on nouns and verbs, and on a comparison of these errors with other morpho-syntactic errors (such as inflection and tense), and with syntactic and lexical errors.
He said that the work was testing hypotheses that have never been tested before and that the data was objectively measuring the validity of what had previously only been theorised.
Wednesday, February 6
The first session of the second day continued to outline the work that is already under way, with presentations from Øistein Andersen, Dr Henriette Hendriks and Prof Michael McCarthy. Prof Mcarthy talked about the problems of defining and differentiating fluency and near fluency, and outlined how corpus linguistics was being used to help solve some of these issues. One problem he discussed was the paucity of available discourse to analyse. Nick Saville offered Prof McCarthy access to 60,000 candidates’ recordings, all grouped at specific CEFR levels (as per the Cambridge ESOL exams they were taking).
Eurocentres’ Stewart Watkins and Dr Igor Lakic of the University of Montenegro both gave introductions to their respective institutions in the second session that morning.
Angeliki Salamoura then gave a short presentation on aligning EP research data to the CEFR. Angeliki explained that while methodology existed for linking exams to the CEFR, it was only partially relevant to EP. For this reason, the quality and consistency of the judgements made were fundamental.
In the afternoon session when attendees had a chance to offer opportunities for collaboration, Angeliki returned with Dora Alexopoulou to discuss how people could get involved in collecting material, extending the data and building new corpora.
Dr Kurtes spoke about the need to make the English Profile network bigger and more global for a wider cross-fertilisation of ideas. She said this would be achieved through seminars and other promotional activities and would be a priority for the coming year. She said that interested people were needed to become regional co-ordinators in order to contribute data, promote projects and disseminate results.
Dr Kurtes said there were two pilot projects taking place, the first to specify the methodology for collecting data for the corpora, and the second were regional EP networks on Italy and Serbia.
The seminar was brought to a close by Nick Saville and Dr Kurtes. Nick Saville said that over the two days, there had been a focus on spoken corpora and there was a need to ensure that more spoken data was made available to the project soon.
He also said that a memorandum of understanding was being developed that would clearly outline that way in which members would be taking part in EP, and defining how they might benefit from any of the research and other work that they have contributed to. It would also outline the permitted use of the EP logo and branding.
Dr Kurtes said that the level of cross-fertilisation of ideas that was evident at the seminar demonstrated that each of the three strands of the research programme was of equal importance in its contribution.
Looking to the future, Dr Kurtes said that another meeting had been set up for July 18-19 2008 and an event would be held by the Serbian hub in September 2008, while a national conference was being planned for September 2009. The August edition of Cambridge ESOL’s Research Notes will focus on English Profile.
Attendees
Delegates:
Dr Junichi Toyota, Lund University, SWEDEN
Dr Igor Lakic, University of Montenegro, MONTENEGRO
Ms Rachel Wu, Language Training and Testing Centre, TAIWAN
Mr Simon Haines, UK
Mr Takahiro Kowata, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, JAPAN
Ms Chihiro Inoue, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, JAPAN
Mrs Anny King, MA, University of Cambridge,UK
Mr Stewart Watkins, Eurocentres, UK
Project Partners/Presenters:
Dr Henriette Hendriks, University of Cambridge, UK
Dr Teresa Parodi, University of Cambridge, UK
Dr Dora Alexopoulou, University of Cambridge, UK
Prof John Hawkins, University of Cambridge, UK
Ms Caroline Williams, University of Cambridge, UK
Dr Paula Buttery, University of Cambridge, UK
Prof Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
Mr Øistein Andersen, University of Cambridge UK
Dr Tony Green, University of Bedfordshire, UK
Dr Vladimir Zegarac, University of Bedfordshire, UK
Mr David Harrison, Cambridge University Press, UK
Ms Hanri Pieterse, Cambridge University Press, UK
Ms Jane Durkin, Cambridge University Press, UK
Ms Roisin Vaughan, Cambridge University Press, UK
Ms Annette Capel, Cambridge University Press,UK
Ms Anne Fiddes, Cambridge University Press,UK
Dr Mike Milanovic, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Mr Nick Saville, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Mr Stephen McKenna, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Svetlana Kurtes, English Profile Project Coordinator, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Sacha DeVelle, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Ms Barbara Stevens, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Angeliki Salamoura, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Neil Jones, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Fiona Barker, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Mr Andy Chamberlain, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Hanan Khalifa, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr Szilvia Papp, Cambridge University ESOL Examinations, UK
Dr John Trim, Council of Europe
Prof Michael McCarthy, Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham, UK
Mr Mark Rendell, English UK, UK
Mr John Knagg, British Council, UK
