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Higher education institutions across Europe are currently involved in a major process of reforming and restructuring as part of the Bologna process which stresses the role of competences and outcomes in curriculum design. This paper reports on the findings of a research project whose purpose was to assess the clarity and the appropriate calibrations of oral production learning outcomes specifically developed for students of engineering and architecture in higher education. Two studies to evaluate the learning outcome descriptors in terms of clarity and calibration to levels of the common framework for language were carried out on three groups of engineering students and another on a group of 13 experienced educators. The results show that problematic learning outcomes can be classified into three types; oral production outcomes describing strategy use; outcomes describing technical activities and outcomes whose language was found to be difficult to understand by the learners, especially outcomes containing dead metaphors. This paper considers the practical implications of these findings for future research on the learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]