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.
We hope that you will enjoy reading the papers and that you may see connections with your own work and interests, especially if you are concerned with benchmarking learners’ competences against the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). You may also see areas in which these papers could be complemented, expanded, underpinned or challenged by your own research. Our aim in this issue is to give readers a flavour of the range of English Profile research and to encourage you to submit for publication in this journal any work which you perceive as having relevance to the aims of English Profile.
This is a new journal interested in new ideas. The Editorial Board consists of a team of international experts from the disciplines of linguistics, applied linguistics and language education, all of whom have an interest in some area of the description of the English language and/or the learning and teaching of it. We hope that this wide range of interests and expertise will attract scholars and practitioners from all corners of the world to submit their work for review and publication. We hope you enjoy the journal and that it will become a regular part of your reading.
