The University of Savoie is a multi-disciplinary university of 12.000 students (13% of whom are international students) and 600 full-time academic staff, 1.000 part-time and professional staff, and 400 technical and administrative staff. The university supports 20 research centres and offers a total of 200 academic programmes at Licence, Masters and Doctoral levels, in all main subject areas except medicine. The University of Savoie has a vigorous policy of developing international relations: the university is presently ranked first out of all the universities in France for the volume of its Erasmus exchanges.

Within the university, the structures that are involved in IEREST project are:

• The Faculty of Languages and Human Sciences (UFR LLSH). This faculty covers the departments of French, Foreign languages, Applied foreign languages, History, Sociology, and Psychology, and offers courses from undergraduate to doctoral level. The staff members participating in the project teach in the departments of Foreign languages and French, and also coordinate the provision of language teaching to students in other departments within the faculty. Associated with the faculty is the Institute for French Studies, which provides full-time French language courses for students from all over the world, and classes in French language and culture for incoming exchange students.

• The LLS Research Laboratory (Languages, literatures, societies). The LLS is an interdisciplinary research group, the largest within the faculty, whose 60 members have research interests in linguistics, literature, cultural studies, history, philosophy and sociology. The staff members participating in the project are involved in two of the main thematic areas of research within the LLS: “language learning” and “mobility”. In 2011 the LLS hosted an Erasmus intensive programme for postgraduate students dedicated to “Languages and cultures in contact/in contrast”, in collaboration with partner universities in Poland, Germany and Turkey.

• The International Relations Office. This is a faculty service which, in collaboration with the university’s central Division of International Relations and the Vice-President for International Affairs, is responsible for the coordination of all student and staff mobilities in the faculty. These include not only Erasmus programmes but also language teaching assistants and exchange programmes with partner regions, in particular Ontario and Quebec.

John Osborne is Professor of English language and linguistics.
Academic training: BA in Modern and Medieval Languages (Cambridge); Licentiate Diploma in TEFL (Trinity College London); MA and PhD in linguistics and phonetics (Grenoble); Habilitation in English Language and Linguistics.
Research interests: second language learning and the application of corpus linguistics to interlanguage studies and to the teaching of languages; evaluation of oral proficiency in foreign languages.
Recently completed or ongoing projects: Compilation of a 1.5 million word corpus of written learner English as part of the Scientext corpus; Parallel oral learner corpus (PAROLE); Collaborative evaluation of oral language proficiency (WebCEF); Raising awareness and enhancing intercultural communicative competences for students and lifelong learners (CEFcult).
Administrative responsibilities: Departmental coordinator for Erasmus exchanges and exchange programmes with Ontario and Quebec; coordinator of the Masters programme for prospective teachers of English and French as a foreign language.