English | British Council

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Human-centred AI: lessons for English learning and assessment

Paper outlining ten key principles for equitable, personalised, and supportive AI use.

Woman stacking sugar cubes into building-like structures, forming a small city on a tabletop.

Understanding Ukrainian young people’s current concerns, needs, and hopes: Looking ahead to a future rebuilding of Ukraine

Research examining how the war in Ukraine shapes young people’s everyday life and perceptions of the future.

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Comprehensibility in language testing

Comprehensibility — how easily a listener can understand a speaker — lies at the heart of successful communication. Yet in language testing, it has often been treated inconsistently. Sometimes it’s broken down into isolated linguistic features, disconnected from real-world communication. Other times, it’s judged intuitively, based on an assessor’s general impression, without considering the listener’s role or broader context.

Over a decade of innovation - Ceibal en Inglés

Ceibal en Inglés is a programme designed to teach English to children in state schools in Uruguay.

Four young people are sitting around a table, reading, with a teacher sitting behind them

Applying the Lexile Framework to evaluate text complexity in the Chinese context: A corpus-based study

Discover how well the Lexile Framework fits China’s English exams, and what it reveals about reading demands across the four key stages of education.

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The impact of textual features in academic journals on learner engagement

Improving sentence structure and flow, not just vocabulary, can boost how well engineering students understand academic texts

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Aligning language education with the CEFR: a handbook

This Handbook is for teachers, testers, and policymakers working to align language education with the CEFR, offering practical guidance and insights for real-world application.

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Exploring the potential for assessing interactional and pragmatic competence in semi-direct speaking tests

Explore how a semi-direct speaking test can capture a broader range of real-world communication skills

Two women and a man sat in a circle having a conversation while doing work.

How bilingual schooling affects students from different socio-economic backgrounds: the student perspective

Discover how bilingual education can help bridge socio-economic gaps in English language learning.

A woman talking on the phone, walking along a bridge with textbooks in her hands.

Advanced speech fluency measurement: innovations and applications

This research tests a new way to measure fluency in second language speech without manual transcription, and looks at how it could support language assessment.