Günter Gerngross was a Professor at the Pädagogische Akademie des Bundes in Graz until 2000 and has since then trained teachers in various European countries. He has published numerous articles on foreign language teaching, several resource books and course materials.

With the advent of the Common European Framework and the Portfolio an international tool has been made available for securing standards within diversity, and for creating a more positive climate in the field of classroom evaluation. The CEF offers rating scales for any kind of communicative output for teachers without specialist training. The Portfolio transforms these scales into a self-evaluative device for students of different age groups. The overall evaluative approach is positive: Teachers and students, will positively describe individual levels of proficiency. New dimensions of communicative performance such as rich language or communicative success can also be assessed.

Günter Nold is a professor of Applied Linguistics and ESL/EFL education at the University of Dortmund, Department of English and American Studies. He has been involved in the development of English textbooks, in empirical research on learning and teaching in the EFL classroom, and at present he is a member of the DESI consortium (the English component), a project similar to PISA in scale.

Born in 1941, Konrad Schröder is a full Professor of English at the University of Augsburg. He is president of the Fachverband Moderne Fremdsprachen and of the Western European Region of FIPLV. He has written books and articles in the fields of language politics and policies, educational planning, student evaluation, the national FL Contest Germany, and on the history of FL acquisition and teaching in Europe.

Claudia Harsch and Henning Rossa are involved with language test construction in the large scale assessment project DESI as assistants to Prof. Dr. Günter Nold (Dortmund) and Prof. Dr. Konrad Schröder (Augsburg). They are both currently working on dissertations in foreign language assessment due to be completed in 2006.

Wolfgang Zydatiss has been professor of applied linguistics (EFL pedagogy) at Berlin's Freie Universität since 1980. He was a teacher at various secondary schools in Berlin, Edinburgh and London before he took up postgraduate studies in Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University. His research interests comprise inter-language studies, content and language integrated learning, teacher training, language testing and the evaluation of experimental school projects.