Meet the English Profile Wordlists: describing what learners Can Do

This is not a typographical error. The capitalization of "Can Do" that you see in the headline above is meant to be printed that way. Buy why? And what is English Profile?

English Profile is a long-term program of research, publishing and corpus development, and the English Profile Wordlists are the first main outcome from that program. It is a collaboration among Cambridge University Press, the exam board Cambridge ESOL, and a number of other academic departments, government bodies and educationists in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Founded in 2006 in Cambridge, UK, but global in outlook, English Profile's mission is to describe in detail what vocabulary, grammar and functional language¹ learners of English "Can Do" as they progress up a well-established set of six levels of language proficiency: the Common European Framework for Reference in Languages (CEFR²). Despite the word 'European', the CEFR is being used more and more around the world to measure students' ability in both English and other languages. However, because the CEFR is language neutral, and because some of its specifications for English are either vague or fairly subjective, English Profile researchers are using empirical evidence to underpin these levels for English, thereby creating a more detailed worldwide standard for proficiency. The English Profile Wordlists, which describe the vocabulary that [End Page 113-] students "Can Do" at each level, could be a useful tool for those who create English dictionaries for non-native speakers.

For those not familiar with the CEFR, it has three main levels, A for Basic User, B for Independent User and C for Proficient User, with two sub-divisions for each one (A1, A2, etc). This simple framework is detailed in hundreds of "Can Do" statements (remember the headline above?), which aim to show what a learner "Can Do" rather than what he or she must do to achieve mastery of a particular level. Two examples are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

As you can see, these "Can Do" statements relate to a learner's writing skills at two different levels, A2 and B1. The words in italics are those that are particularly subjective and open to interpretation. What words or phrases are used in a short, simple note or message? What vocabulary might be contained in a short, basic description of an event or activity? This is what the English Profile Wordlists team³ aims to address. To do this, they are using a variety of sources, most importantly corpus data. So far, the primary corpus for English Profile researchers has been the Cambridge Learner Corpus, another Cambridge University Press-Cambridge ESOL collaboration which includes to date more than 45 million words from texts produced by learners around the world who are taking Cambridge exams.

However, because the data in the Cambridge Learner Corpus is based on exam material, its scope is a bit limited. An exam is an artificial environment in which students write or speak about a particular pre-determined subject, and thus is not likely to yield the most natural writing or speech. English Profile researchers could gain even more valuable insights from a corpus that is based on other learner material, such as classroom work, homework, classroom discussions, casual conversations, and so on. Therefore, the English Profile corpus team is working on collecting data from schools, universities and individual teachers in (at last count) sixteen different countries around the world⁴. The team hopes to expand that network even more over the next several years, and are aiming for a corpus of 10 million words of learner writing and speech, balanced in terms of first language and CEFR level, within the next two to three years.

The vocabulary, grammar and functional language that English Profile researchers are examining will be captured in a set of Reference Level Descriptions (RLDs) for English⁵, which will be made available to the public between 2011 and 2013. The first component of the RLDs for English is the English Profile Wordlists.

Similar in format to an online dictionary, the Wordlists provide...