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Background: Although teachers of English are required to assess students' speaking proficiency in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), their ability to rate is seldom evaluated. The application of descriptors in the assessment of English speaking on CEFR in the context of English as a foreign language has not often been investigated, either. Methods: The present study first introduced a form of rater standardization training. Two trained raters then assessed the speaking proficiency of 100 learners by means of actual corpus data. The study then compared their rating results to evaluate interrater reliability. Next, ten samples of exact/adjacent agreement between Raters 1 and 2 were rated by six teachers of English in tertiary education. Two of them had attended rater standardization training with Raters 1 and 2, while the other four had not received any relevant training. Results: The two raters agreed exactly in 44% of cases. The rating results between the two trained raters were closely correlated (ρ = .893). Cross-tabulation showed that in one third of the samples, Rater 2 scored higher than Rater 1 and they agreed more often at the higher levels. The better rating performance of Teachers 1 and 2 suggested that rater standardization training may have helped enhance their performance. The unsatisfactory proportion of correctly assigned levels in teachers' ratings overall was probably due to the high input of subjective judgment based on vague CEFR descriptors. Conclusions: Regarding assessment, it is shown that the attendance of rater standardization training is of help in assessing learners' speaking proficiency in CEFR. This study provides a model for assessing data from spoken learner corpora, which adds an important attribute to future studies of learner corpora. The paper also raises doubts about teachers' ability to evaluate students' speaking proficiency in CEFR. As CEFR has been widely adopted in the relevant fields of English language teaching and assessment, it is suggested that the rating training framework established in this study, which uses learner corpus data, be offered to (prospective) teachers of English in tertiary education.

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T he Intercultural Product Pitch OIL (Online International Learning) Project set out to broaden the international experience for a small cohort of undergraduate students by enabling them to collaborate on a series of activities that would raise intercultural awareness and improve key communication skills. The project involved collaboration between International Business and Marketing students based in the UK and students from institutions in Belgium and Finland. This paper describes the key stages of this OIL project, highlighting how it can enhance students' global learning experience.

This comparative study evaluates the vocabulary knowledge of comparable groups of English learners from three L1 backgrounds: French, Finnish, and Mandarin Chinese. An investigation of differences in vocabulary knowledge revealed that vocabulary of Greek or Latin origin is much more likely to be known by French speaking students than words of non Graeco-Latin origin. Finnish students did much better on words of non Graeco-Latin origin, although they still outperformed the French speakers on Graeco-Latin words. The performance of the native Chinese speakers was the worst of the three groups, and there was no significant difference with this group between the two sets of words. The findings have clear implications for the teaching of academic English vocabulary in EAP settings where students share an L1. In mixed L1 settings, instructors may need to take account of variation in vocabulary knowledge among different L1 student groups.As is widely known, a large proportion of English vocabulary is of Graeco-Latin (GL) origin. Most native English speakers would agree that frequent use of GL words could be an indication of a greater vocabulary and indeed of a higher level of education. Corson (1982Corson ( , 1985, posited the existence of a lexical bar in English, whereby members of certain social classes, who do not acquire the L1 vocabulary necessary to express more abstract technical and academic thought, are denied full access to the curriculum as they go through the school system. In English, a high proportion of scientific and technical terms take the form of GL words. GL words are more difficult to acquire inasmuch as specialist vocabulary tends to represent more difficult concepts.Whilst social class, prosperity, and a range of other environmental factors may influence the degree to which Asian learners acquire English, it is of course extremely unlikely that such factors have any impact on the type of vocabulary learned. However, the lack of GL cognates in a given language will probably place its native speakers at a disadvantage when learning English vocabulary. It can plausibly be argued that a lexical bar similar to Corson's exists for certain EFL learners; the height of this bar would be in inverse proportion to the density of GL