English Profile is both a global research programme, and a lively and growing global community made up of researchers, academics, corpus linguists, teachers, testers, ministries of education, and other language specialists. This website is the centre of that community.
The founding partners in English Profile are:
Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Asessment are the main funding partners in English Profile. In addition, English Profile has a number of data contributor partners who have contributed data to our corpus, and there were also a number of organisations involved in the EU-funded English Profile Network project.
The English Profile Programme is the latest stage in a process dating back to the 1970s, when John Trim and Jan van Ek developed the original Threshold series, the first systematic specification of learning objectives for the English language. Threshold specified objectives for a broadly intermediate level: a lower and an upper level were subsequently described, known as Waystage and Vantage. Collectively known as the Threshold or T-series, they contributed to the development of the six-level scale of the Council of Europe Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).
