English Profile: Reference Level Descriptions for English

Paula Buttery (Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge University)

English Profile is a long term, collaborative programme of research designed to enhance the learning, teaching and assessment of English worldwide. Building on existing resources such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, a multi-disciplinary team is working to produce Reference Level Descriptions for English. These are expected to provide a uniquely detailed and objective analysis of what proficiency levels in language learning actually encapsulate in terms of grammar, vocabulary and discourse features.

First steps towards this aim are being undertaken by an empirical study of the Cambridge Learner Corpus---a corpus containing 26 million words of learners' written scripts produced by candidates taking the Cambridge ESOL examinations. Around half of this corpus has been manually coded for errors and the entirety has been automatically annotated with part-of-speech tags and grammatical relations. A search and retrieval interface has been developed allowing researchers to query, extract and collate data from the corpus over specified phenomena. Preliminary investigations include the analysis of specific errors made by learners whose native languages are from different language families; and also the convergence of learner English over increasing proficiency levels towards a specified norm.

In this presentation an overview of the project will be given followed by a more detailed description of the methodology and preliminary findings of the large-scale corpus based work.