Josef Huber is a teacher of English, French and German as a foreign language. He is currently working as Deputy Executive Director/Head of Programmes of the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML). The ECML is a Council of Europe institution, whose aim is to promote the learning and teaching of modern languages in Europe. His previous work includes language teaching in schools and universities in Austria, United Kingdom, France, and Bulgaria; textbook writing; CALL-software; school development and project work at the ECML for School Development, Austrian Ministry of Education.

Arthur Hughes has been involved in language test development and research for almost thirty years. He established the Testing and Evaluation Unit at Reading University and was the joint founder-editor of the journal Language Testing. On leave from Reading, he headed testing projects in Turkey (1982-84) and Morocco (1993-94). He has also carried out consultancies throughout the world, most recently in Egypt (1999-2002). His best known books are English Accents and Dialects (with Trudgill) and Testing for Language Teachers, the second edition of which was published in 2002.

Batia Laufer (Ph.D. University of Edinburgh) is professor and chair of English Language and Literature department at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her main contribution to the field of Applied Linguistics is her research on Vocabulary Acquisition in Additional Languages. Her additional research areas are Lexicography, Cross Linguistic Influence, Reading and Testing. She published several books and numerous articles in various professional journals (Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, SSLA, IRAL, Modern Language Journal, Language Testing and others). She lectured in over 20 countries: delivered invited talks at 28 different universities and presented papers at 62 international conferences, including a key-note address on vocabulary at AILA 1999 World Congress in Tokyo.

Clive Perdue went to the Max-Planck-Institut fur Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, in 1981, where he was scientific co-ordinator for the European Science Foundation's international research programme entitled "Second language acquisition by adult immigrants", which investigated language processing in a social setting by studying how adult immigrants set about acquiring a new language through everyday contacts with its speakers. He has recently organised, on behalf of a European network of language-acquisition research teams, a two-conference EURESCO series on the general theme of "The dynamics of language development", and edited a thematic issue (22:3, 2000) of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, which is representative of this group's work. He is now Professor in the General Linguistics department of the Universite de Paris VIII, and head of the Unite Mixte de Recherche "Structures Formelles du Langage" (Paris VIII and CNRS).

Michael Sharwood Smith taught English as a Foreign Language for one year in Montpellier, France and then, for two years for the British Centre, Sweden, did a postgraduate Diploma in Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University, Scotland in 1969/70 and taught English and Applied Linguistics for 4 years as British Council Senior Lecturer at the Uniwersytet im A. Mickiewicza, in Poznan, Poland, where he completed his Ph.D in English Linguistics Between 1975 and 1999, he worked in the Netherlands, at the English Department of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Utrecht. During this period, he founded 2 international journals, (Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, Utrecht, and Second Language Research), the last one fully refereed, ran a long series of international research symposia (LARS), was Vice-President and then Secretary of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA) and completed well over a hundred articles and books in TEFL, applied linguistics and theoretical second language acquisition including Second Language Learning Theoretical Foundations. ( London: Longman 1994) He has recently set up the web-based International Commission on Second Language Acquisition Since 1999 he has been Chair of Languages at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland and is working on cognitive processes in language acquisition and language attrition