On the Road with Gary in …Romania, Greece and the Czech Republic

Finally back home in Paris after three straight back-to-back-to-back weekend conferences (but my line manager said 'Do it!' and my wife said D'accord): the national Romanian Association of Teachers of English conference where 300 teachers gathered in the lovely city of Cluj; TESOL Macedonia-Thrace-Northern Greece in Thessaloniki with about 100 teachers (in fact, contrary to the poem above, I would amend one thing: more participants next year for this impeccably organised conference!); and the annual University of West Bohemia regional conference in Plzen, Czech Republic, with 240 teachers.

I gave three presentations at each conference and in my workshops we were looking at various subjects:

• tackling the need to sometimes focus on work on separate skills and the solution offered in the Cambridge English 'Real' Skills series;
• digital Classware with More! for tween-agers and face2face for young adults and adults to use with an Interactive WhiteBoard, an electronic-beam such as Mimio® (which makes any whiteboard interactive!) – or just a data projector and a wall;
• 'Putting the Portfolio into Practice with Teenagers in Mind' about using Language Portfolios and the Portfolio Builders that accompany English in Mind;
• 'ELT into the Digital Age' – you know: digital natives ('screen-agers') vs. digital (im)migrants, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (Are you on Facebook? I am – though I'm not yet a member of the Twitterati), publishers' websites such as www.cambridge.org/elt with loads of (usually) free resources for teachers and learners, and innovative 'collaborative' sites such as English360.

At each conference I also gave a plenary talk entitled 'Profiling English Profile' which aimed to provide an overview of the English Profile programme.

English Profile is a long-term, collaborative programme involving the British Council, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ESOL and other partners including academics, teachers, education authorities, computer analysts and corpus linguists such as Professor Michael McCarthy (who has called English Profile 'one of the most exciting ELT developments in recent years'). The aim is to create a 'profile' or description of English (Profile deutsch has already been done this for German) to show concretely how learners of English progress through the different Common European Framework levels. (I'm sure you've read the whole Common European Framework of References for Languages: Teaching, learning and assessment – or, well, at least looked at the important appendices.)

The English Profile Reference Level Descriptions for English will provide a detailed and objective analysis of what achievement in English language learning actually means in terms of the grammar, vocabulary and discourse features that learners can be expected to demonstrate at each CEF level, sort of like the Periodic Chart (remember chemistry class?) for English. Or: I imagine you know the story of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' in which an emperor parades around somewhat… naked. Well, the Common European Framework is sort of like that emperor, i.e., being paraded around not fully clothed – English Profile aims, if you will, to clothe the Emperor CEF with different linguistic outfits for different CEF levels.

Voilà from me on English Profile. But if you would like to know more about the project, well you can 'Google it!' (as my daughter would say), or go directly to www.englishprofile.org for more information (including a preview of the online A1-B2 wordlists, the 'Word of the Week', and news such as the recent article about the €0.5 million grant from the European Union life-long learning scheme to the English Profile programme) and, if you want, find out how to sign up to collaborate and get involved.

Look forward to seeing some of you perhaps at conferences over the next two weekends (yes, again! – but my line manager said…and my wife said…) at TESOL Italy in Rome and at LAKMA/LATEFL in Klaipeda, Lithuania.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer