Dr Nick Saville is a member of the Cambridge English Senior Management Team and is responsible for directing the work of the Research and Validation Group. He holds a PhD from the University of Bedfordshire in language test impact, as well as degrees in Linguistics and in TEFL from the University of Reading. He has specialised in language assessment since 1987. Before joining Cambridge in 1989, he taught at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and managed test development projects in Tokyo.

Nick has close involvement in European initiatives, such as the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and related ‘toolkit’, and represents Cambridge English in the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE). His current research interests include: the development of models for investigating test
impact; the implementation of quality management systems (QMS) in test development and validation; the uses of language assessment for migration and citizenship purposes; and the use of language corpora in test development and validation.

He is a member of the Cambridge team responsible for co-ordinating the English Profile Programme and in setting up the University’s Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment. The latter involves the building of large learner corpora and the application of computational linguistics and machine learning in developing automated tutoring and assessment systems.

Nick presents regularly at international conferences and has published widely on issues related to language assessment. He was a founding associate editor of the journal Language Assessment Quarterly (2004 onwards) and is the joint editor of the English Profile Studies series.