Welcome to the first issue of the English Profile Journal. The journal has been launched by Cambridge University Press to mark a significant stage in the development of the English Profile Programme. In February 2009, representatives of the institutions, groups and individuals involved in English Profile gathered together for a two-day seminar in Cambridge. The attendees shared the provisional results of their ongoing research into various aspects of the project and discussed ways forward for the network of collaborators and partners that English Profile has grown into. Members of the seminar presented their work, which was critiqued by the assembled participants. Over the months that followed, the presenters refined and documented their research presentations, and it is a selection of those papers which we now publish in this first issue, which will be incrementally published hereafter, and free until at least the end of 2012. Our aim is to showcase a representative cross-section of the kinds of research being carried out under the auspices of English Profile.

The history of language teaching from the nineteenth century to the modern day is discussed including the initiatives of the Council of Europe following ratification of the Convention on Cultural Cooperation in 1954. It was this post-war initiative that paved the way for development of the Threshold level as a marker for language competency. More recently Waystage and Vantage levels have been added, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages now provides a six level framework for testing language proficiency. The English Profile Programme is an innovative undertaking to develop these achievements further.

The English Profile Wordlists provide a web resource showing the most common words and phrases in use by learners of English. Designed for use by language professionals from teacher trainers to examination writers, and with input from contributors and reviewers from around the world, the Wordlists document learner vocabulary through corpus-informed research. Vocabulary is graded according to the four Basic and Independent User levels of the Common European Framework of Reference (levels A1–B2) and is selected following a ‘can-do’ rationale – focussing on what learners do know rather than on what they should know. Preview versions of the British and American English Wordlists are available through public preview, offering detailed search functionality. There are further development opportunities to extend the Wordlists for young learners and for Business English, as well as to cover vocabulary at the C levels.

An important priority for the English Profile programme is to incorporate empirical evidence of the spoken language into the Common European Framework (CEFR). At present, the CEFR descriptors relating to the spoken language include references to fluency and its development as the learner moves from one level to another. This article offers a critique of the monologic bias of much of our current approach to spoken fluency. Fluency undoubtedly involves a degree of automaticity and the ability quickly to retrieve ready-made chunks of language. However, fluency also involves the ability to create flow and smoothness across turn-boundaries and can be seen as an interactive phenomenon in discourse. The article offers corpus evidence for the notion of confluence, that is the joint production of flow by more than one speaker, focusing in particular on turn-openings and closings. It considers the implications of an interactive view of fluency for pedagogy, assessment and in the broader social context.

One of the major goals of the Cambridge English Profile Programme is to identify ‘criterial features’ for each of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency levels as they apply to English, and to assess the impact of different first languages on these features (through ‘transfer’ effects). The present paper defines what is meant by criterial features and proposes an initial taxonomy of four types. Numerous illustrations are given from our collaborative research to date on the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The benefits and challenges posed by these features for corpus linguistics and for theories of second language acquisition are briefly outlined, as are the benefits and challenges for language assessment practices and for publishing ventures that make use of them as supplements to the current CEFR descriptors.

The founding purpose of the English Profile Programme is to answer the Council of Europe's (2005) call for a set of Reference Level Descriptions (RLDs) for English linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The Council of Europe has issued guidelines setting out broad parameters for RLD development. This paper discusses how RLD might be developed for English in relation to the aims of the CEFR, incorporating consideration of critical voices, reports on the experiences of users of the CEFR and a review of currently operational RLDs for English: the Threshold series. On the basis of these sources, recommendations are made for the ongoing development of the English Profile Programme.

The English Profile Programme is a major inter-disciplinary, research-based collaborative project to develop detailed reference level descriptions (RLDs) of the English of L2 language learners, linked to the general principles and approaches of the Council of Europe. The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) provides language proficiency bands against which the profile is categorised. Large samples of writing and speech are required for the Programme, with the Cambridge Learner Corpus providing data for the initial phase.

The English Profile workshop and seminar sessions held in Cambridge in February 2010 aimed to update English Profile network members on the accomplishments of the programme to date and to look forward to a strong year of progress ahead. The author addressed the opening and closing sessions and provides an overview of the meeting.