CEFR profiles for oral English certification of lecturers in higher education

Internationalization has become one of the main strategic goals of universities as part of their endeavors to prepare students for careers in a globalized world. However, the establishment of English-medium instruction (EMI) has raised concerns about the quality of teaching and learning, given that most stakeholders involved in the process are second language (L2) speakers of English. Therefore, alongside internationalization policies, a number of universities across Europe have also implemented policies for internal assessment of lecturers' English proficiency with the intention to ensure the quality of teaching. Given that oral English ability for teaching in EMI is an under-researched construct, limited information is available about EMI lecturers' linguistic and communicative ability profiles. Based on the EMI lecturer performances from the TAEC corpus, this chapter discusses how Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scales can be utilized to outline EMI lecturer profiles, and how understanding the complexity of their profiles allows us to identify the sources of communication difficulties and provide detailed feedback and/or offer adequate training support.