Shift in emphasis at English Profile seminar
Delegates at July's English Profile Seminar in Cambridge.
The sixth in the series of English Profile Network Seminars took place in the Pitt Building, Cambridge, on 17-18 July 2008.
The seminars have grown in attendance as the project has developed and the membership of the network increased. July’s seminar saw many long-standing contributors return to give presentations on recent work. A number of people for whom this was their first English Profile Seminar were also welcomed, including Professor Donald Freeman of the University of Michigan. All the seminar attendees and English Profile partners were delighted that Dr John Trim was able to attend once more, representing the Council of Europe.
The proceedings opened with a presentation by Nick Saville and Dr Svetlana Kurtes English Profile: ways forward – from ‘project’ to ‘profile’. Nick Saville said that the project was moving from Phase One – the setting up of the project between 2005-8, into Phase Two where the emphasis would be more on delivering the outputs and how these would be communicated to the wider community.
He said one of the key features of the coming phase of English Profile would be to establish the criterial differences between the levels and mapping those against the language acquisition curve and what L2 speakers can do, based on evidence from corpora.
Dr Kurtes outlined the three future priorities of the project:
- research and development work
- extending and developing the network of collaborators
- promotional activities
New areas of focus are:
Corpus linguistics
Developing sets of criterial features which will distinguish the B levels.
Assessment of L1 interference from learners with different first languages – these areas to be principally investigated by Professor John Hawkins, Dr Henrietta Hendricks, Dr Teresa Parodi and Dr Dora Alexopoulou.
Language learning and teaching
- Language pedagogy – Examining cultural specific differences in academic discourse
- Curricular and assessment – further studies of functional progression from B2-C2 levels
- Teacher education – closer collaboration
Communications
Colleagues from Cambridge ESOL and CUP would be working to develop communications strategies for English Profile and for developing the English Profile website.
Dr Kurtes said that the key to delivering these targets was the greater involvement of local and regional co-ordinators, greater contributions of data from network members and increased promotional activities of events and the results of research.
Dr Tony Green of CRELLA led the first session of reports, with a presentation on progress being made with research on the differences between B and C levels. He said they were looking at word use within those contexts and were examining differences between modality, moral evaluation, suasion, positive-ness, definitiveness, clarity and performance.
Dr Green said that as the levels increased, it became harder to make specific linguistic statements about them.
The survey phase of the project was about to begin, and network members would be asked for their feedback. He said the project could continue to seek to distil ever clearer examples of C level performance.
Dr John Trim, who spoke at the seminar.At the end of Dr Green’s presentation, Dr Trim made a valuable contribution to this subject. Speaking ex tempore, he said that part of the difficulties in specifying the C levels were that there was a danger of the C2 level being idealised into a “statement of perfection” that no-one could attain. He said that both A1 and C2 shared a common difficulty in not being delimited by having another level on either side.
Moreover, he said, the levels themselves were social constructs: “The six-level analysis is not one that comes naturally from language, but one that comes from the structure of education systems … the problems are profound and the solutions have to be provisional and need to be subject to radical revision as our knowledge increases.”
Dr Vladimir Žegarac, of the University of Bedfordshire presented his paper: A Cognitive Pragmatic Perspective on Metadiscourse: A Pilot Study, which examined the roles of metadiscourse in communication. He said: “Language is always a consequence of interaction, of the differences between people which are expressed verbally, and metadiscourse options are the ways we articulate and construct these interactions.”
Dr Žegarac’s pilot study included two samples of texts (IELTS and university textbooks) with each sample being of around 30,000 words. When these texts were mapped against Hyland’s (2005) list of metadiscourse markers, a number of variations in the use of metadiscourse became apparent. These included instances of some forms of metadiscourse being:
- relatively frequent in undergraduate texts, but not found in IELTS texts at all
- considerably more frequent in undergraduate texts than in IELTS texts
- found in neither IELTS or undergraduate texts
- found more frequently in IELTS texts than in undergraduate texts.
Dr Žegarac concluded that further research would provide a better perspective on the role of metadiscourse in different types of text and new insights into the way metadiscourse should be represented in assessment materials for English as a second language.
Professor JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, of the Complutense University of Madrid, presented an interesting piece on writing standards among B1 level students.
She said university students had not been adequately given the necessary skills to make the transition from ‘knowledge telling’ to ‘knowledge transformation’. This resulted in at best, poor writing, and at worst, wholesale plagiarism, where students did not understand that original material was required of them. Prof. Neff-van Aertselaer said that some had taken the approach that students that plagiarised needed to be caught out, and tools had been developed to spot plagiarism in text. However, she believed students instead needed to be engaged with and taught the skills to write properly.
Prof JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (L), of the Complutense University of Madrid, addresses the seminar with with English Profile Coordinator Svetlana Kurtes (R).
Ron Ragsdale and David Harrison of Cambridge University Press gave a short presentation on how they saw the future of the outputs of the English Profile: “A few years from now, anyone wanting to know about the teaching and learning of English will turn to English Profile … it will be a bit like owning the Periodic Table,” said David Harrison. Ron Ragsdale outlined a series of publications he expected the programme to deliver, including an English Profile Journal (both in print and online), a volume of Studies in Language Testing, and Cambridge Applied Linguistics. He also anticipates publishing readers re-aligned to the EP wordlists, along with vocabulary and grammar materials for reference and practice and revised and refined EP workbooks and activity handbooks for each level.
Dr Henriette Hendriks’presentation outlined work being carried out by RCEAL investigating how learners move from forming strings of words to being able to carry out the functions of discourse – one of the last functions that learners acquire.
The goals of the work carried out by RCEAL are to look at language specific differences using the Cambridge Learner Corpus.
Friday July 18
On the second day of the conference, Dr Kurtes, outlined two new strands of research: language pedagogy and teacher education:
Language Pedagogy
Focuses on a range of issues surrounding English language learning and teaching across cultures and national didactic practices. Projects are planned to be carried out in several key stages involving closer collaboration with external partners, primarily colleagues from English departments in Europe and further abroad. Plans already under way to set up an international team of researchers focusing on culture specific differences in academic discourse.
Teacher Education
This strand will focus on how classroom-based research might be established as a strand within the programme within the EP network (with particular importance placed on the role of the teacher as researcher and involving teachers with corpus linguistics).
This strand will also investigate the impact of culture and identity on the teaching of English language around the world, the teachers’ conceptions of English as subject matter and other attitudinal and motivational factors. It will also focus on ‘knowledge for teaching’ and particularly on ‘knowledge of English for English teachers’ or teachers as language learners.
The first discussion session of the day was led by Professor Mike McCarthy of the University of Nottingham, and focused on developing spoken corpora. Prof McCarthy said spoken language was under-represented in most of the significant corpora of English, and for the purposes of English Profile it would be necessary to validate the levels of spoken language as well as those for written. He said the descriptions of English fluency within the CEFR lacked precision, although they described criterial differences in ability.
One of the obstacles to developing spoken corpora was that of cost – transcribing spoken words into text costs around €13,000 per million words.
Some pilot schemes were already underway, however, such as the project with Shannon College of Hotel Management and the University of Limerick, which will start in September this year. The data from these projects would be used to examine fluency using four criteria: ability to use chunks of language; a repertoire of small words; the use of turn openers and the use of cohesive markers. Prof McCarthy said that it was emerging that fluency was in reality confluency, and that fluency was a joint enterprise, where speakers attend to one another in an interactive process.
The second discussion session, on the role of the teacher within English Profile, was led by Cambridge ESOL director Nick Saville.
He introduced the session with an overview of how second language acquisition has followed either socially oriented or cognitive paradigms, with much of the emphasis being on the cognitive and meta-cognitive elements of processes between the learner and the test taker. However, recent research has shown that teaching and learning can be viewed as social interaction happening within a social construction. Cambridge ESOL has sought to bring these two elements together in its own socio-cognitive approach to exam validation.
Nick Saville said that in expanding data in corpora, additional information about the teaching environment, and the materials and methodologies used by teachers would also need to be collected. To develop this strand within the project, he suggested introducing a network partner with experience of teacher education to:
- review current teaching trends within a global context
- focus on how classroom-based research can be incorporated into the English Profile programme
- examine the impact of culture and identity on teaching English
- focus on the knowledge for teaching (what teachers know about teaching) and teachers knowledge of English.
Evelina Galazci gave a supporting presentation on Cambridge ESOL’s teaching awards.
Professor Donald Freemanof the University of Michigan’ presentation on the role of EP in teaching and teacher education looked at how the CEFR, as a framework of language outcomes, can affect language teaching. He said while the CEFR was a not a curriculum, it was leading towards curricular material. He looked at three aspects of how learning took place:
- the setting – the environment in which the learning took place;
- representation, what took place to enable people to learn
- engagement, what happened when the learning took place.
He said engagement was made up of the practice - what was happening between the teacher and the student, the agency – who was doing what in terms of teaching and learning and the resources – what was present in the learning environment.
Prof Freeman said that resources could be as simple as how many books were available for the class, but could also be viewed in terms of non-concrete resources, such as does the teacher have sufficient time to teach what is on a syllabus? He said recent studies of the US federal education policy had shown that the most critical resource in learning was the teacher, with the teacher being responsible for 20% of a student’s learning gain over a year.
He said that some teaching practice mattered more than others, and by recording data about environment and teaching practice in corpora, it could be used to identify opportunities to improve learning.
The final formal presentation of the seminar came from RCEAL’s Dr Dora Alexopolou, who talked about data collection and ways to increase engagement. She said data collection had already started with two schools in Lombardy, Italy submitting written data. Some teachers were giving written assignments during class time and others were giving the assignment for students to do in their own time. Students writing in their own time wrote longer, so there was a trade-off in terms of getting either more students from classroom activity or more data from tasks completed at home.
She said schools were currently taking part because of their interest in the project, but that to get greater engagement, more ways of increasing the benefits to teachers and schools needed to be found. One suggestion was allowing schools to have a ‘mini-corpus’ of their own data which they could access. She also said that looking to the future, they needed to move away from paper collection to reduce the amount of labour required. Dora suggested that data collection could be automated through the English Profile network website.
The seminar finished with an open debate about the future direction of English Profile with regard to publishable outputs.
English Profile Seminar Participants
Invited participants:
Prof JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, Complutense University of Madrid, SPAIN
Prof Donald Freeman, University of Michigan, USA
Dr Marty Meinardi, Dublin Institute of Technology, IRELAND
Project team:
Dr Henriette Hendriks, University of Cambridge
Dr Teresa Parodi, University of Cambridge
Dr Dora Alexopoulou, University of Cambridge
Dr Paula Buttery, University of Cambridge
Mr Øistein Andersen, University of Cambridge
Dr Tony Green, University of Bedfordshire
Dr Vladimir Zegarac, University of Bedfordshire
Mr David Harrison, Cambridge University Press
Ms Hanri Pieterse, Cambridge University Press
Mr Ron Ragsdale, Cambridge University Press
Ms Jane Durkin, Cambridge University Press
Ms Caroline Thiriau, Cambridge University Press
Ms Anne Fiddes, Cambridge University Press
Dr Mike Milanovic, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Mr Nick Saville, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Mr Chris Lewis, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr Svetlana Kurtes, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr Sacha DeVelle, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Ms Barbara Stevens, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr Evelina Galaczi, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr Fiona Barker, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr Szilvia Papp, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Dr John Trim, Council of Europe
Prof Michael McCarthy, University of Nottingham
Mr Mark Rendell, English UK
Mr John Knagg, British Council
