Check

Who we are

Research team

María Belén Díez-Bedmar

Universidad de Jaén

María Belén Díez-Bedmar is Associate Professor at the University of Jaén and serves as ViceDirector of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Modern Languages at Universidad de Jaén. Her main research interests are the study of learner language, the compilation, analysis and exploitation of learner corpora, the use of the CEFR and the CV and the characterization of the language by L1 Spanish adolescents with emotional disorders or at risk of developing them. She is the PI of the project "Making the CEFR/CV more user-friendly: fine-tuning descriptors with Learner Corpus Research (LCR) results", Project PID2020-117041GA-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. She has been member of the Learner Corpus Association board for eight years (December 2013- Jan 2022) and is co-chair of the panel "Teaching of languages and curricular design" in the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics.

Visit her profile at ResearchGate, ORCID or SCOPUS.

María Luisa Carrió-Pastor

Universitat Politècnica de València

María Luisa Carrió-Pastor (orcid.org/0000-0002-3040-5362) is a professor of English language at Universitat Politècnica de València. Her research areas are contrastive linguistics, pragmatics and the study of academic and professional discourse both for second language acquisition and discourse analysis.

Visit her profile at Research Gate and UPV.

Natalia Judith Laso Martín

Universitat de Barcelona

Natalia J. Laso is a Serra Hunter fellow in English Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. She holds a PhD in English Philology and is also a member of the GRELIC- Research Group. Dr. Natalia J. Laso specialises in learner corpus research and ERPP.

Visit her academic profile.

Gloria Luque-Agulló

Universidad de Jaén

She works in the field of Applied Linguistics, with a focus on Foreign Language (FL) learning and teaching. In the area of learning, she has specialised in the learners' language and those factors affecting the process. Regarding teaching, she deals with curriculum design, teaching methodologies and materials development.

Visit her profile at ORCID and Scopus.

Carmen Maíz-Arévalo

University Complutense of Madrid

Carmen Maíz-Arévalo obtained her PhD in Linguistics in 2001. In 2006, she joined the department of English Studies: Linguistics and Literature at the Complutense University in Madrid, when she became associate professor in 2018. Her research focuses on Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics. For the past few years, she has combined this interest in Pragmatics with Digital Communication. She has published numerous articles on these issues in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning; the Journal of Politeness Research, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies and Intercultural Pragmatics; and taken part in many congresses, both national and international. Since January 2020, she has been the Head of the Complutense Centre of Foreign Languages.

Visit her profile at ORCID and Scopus.

María del Carmen Méndez García

Universidad de Jaén

Catedrática de Universidad del Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Su principal área de investigación es la interculturalidad y la enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjera. Ha colaborado con la División / Unidad de Política Lingüística del Consejo de Europa en el desarrollo de la Autobiografía de Encuentros Interculturales y la Autobiografía de Encuentros Interculturales a través de Medios Visuales.

Arturo Montejo-Ráez

Universidad de Jaén

Arturo holds a PhD in Computer Science. With 19 JCR articles and more than 90 research contributions, his scientific activity focuses on human language technologies, with special attention to machine learning techniques. He is member of the SINAI research group and CTO of the spin-off Yottacode S.L.

Visit his profile at Scopus, ORCID and Google Scholar

Advisory group

Mark Brenchley

Cambridge Assessment English, United Kingdom

Mark Brenchley is a Senior Research Manager at Cambridge Assessment English, where he has a special focus on the application of corpus-based approaches to learning and assessment. His main areas of interest include corpus linguistics, tagging/parsing systems, automarking, and the linguistic basis of writing development.

Mark holds a PhD in Education from the University of Exeter, where he explored the development of spoken and written syntax in L1 English students. Following his PhD, he co-developed the Growth in Grammar Corpus, a novel corpus of student writing that covers the primary and secondary phases of the English education system.

Visit his profile at ORCID

Neus Figueras

Universitat de Barcelona

Dr. Neus Figueras has been involved in a number of international research and development projects related to assessment at different education levels and has given courses and presented in universities in Spain, in various European countries, in Asia and in the USA. She has also carried out consultancy work in assessment and in curriculum design. She has collaborated regularly with the Council of Europe in the uses and the dissemination of the CEFR in language testing and assessment and is one of the authors of the Manual for Relating examinations to the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2009). She has recently co-edited with David Little Reflecting on the CEFR and its Companion Volume, published in 2022 by Multilingual Matters.

She is a founding member of EALTA (European Association for Language Testing and Assessment), and is currently the coordinator of the EALTA CEFR SIG.

Brian North

Council of Europe

Brian North has been a researcher and consultant to the Council of Europe since 1991 and is a former chair of Eaquals. After developing the CEFR levels and descriptors in his PhD in a Swiss National Science Foundation project, he co-authored the CEFR itself, the prototype European Language Portfolio, the manual for relating assessments to the CEFR, Eaquals? CEFR core inventories (English and French) and the CEFR Companion Volume. Other CEFR-related projects include investigation of CEFR use in Canada and Switzerland, alignment of the Canadian Language Benchmarks to the CEFR and the ECML?s CEFR QualiMatrix. Publications include: Development of a Common Framework Scale of Language Proficiency (2000: Peter Lang); The CEFR in Practice (2014: Cambridge); Language Course Planning (with M. Angelova, E. Jarosz & R. Rossner: 2018: Oxford), and The Action-oriented Approach (with E. Piccardo, 2019: Multilingual Matters).

Visit his profile at ORCID

Jennifer Thewissen

University of Antwerp & Saint-Louis University, Belgium

Jennifer Thewissen is a lecturer in English language and linguistics in Belgium. She specializes in learner corpus research and has extensively researched the construct of accuracy and its development across CEFR proficiency levels. She currently studies the dynamic development of both accuracy and complexity in learner corpus data.

Visit her profile at ORCID

Language centers