The Council of Europe: a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment

The Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment project was one of the main components in Phase 2 of the more extensive project, Language Learning for European Citizenship (1989–1996).

ALTE members were involved in various stages of the development work of the Common European Framework and in particular ALTE was commissioned by the Council of Europe to prepare a supplementary document intended for people involved in language test development. This document is entitled a Users Guide for examiners. The work to produce this Users Guide was able to draw extensively on work completed for The item-writer Guidelines Project (described on this page).

Certain aspects of the Common Framework have already had an influence on the way ALTE members describe their examinations. In particular this relates to the specification of domains and communicative activities. In this conception of communication, the language users communicative competence is activated through various language activities which are themselves contextualised within domains. These domains are broadly classified as fourfold: personal, public, occupational and educational, and the communicative activities are sub-divided into those which are productive, receptive, interactive and mediating.

• Production includes speaking activities as diverse as addressing audiences and singing, while examples of written production include creative writing as well as filling in forms and questionnaires.

• Receptive activities concern listening and reading, including specific purposes for these activities, listening or reading for gist, for specific information, for detailed understanding, etc.

• Interactive activities may be spoken or written. For speaking, these range from formal discussion, debate and interviews to informal conversations and verbal exchanges. For writing they include the exchange of correspondence by memos, faxes, letters and e-mail.

• Mediating activities include translation, interpretation, summarizing and paraphrasing in order to facilitate communication between others.

This work is consistent with the ALTE projects to develop competency-based proficiency scales and ALTEs attempts to describe examinations in terms of what language users at each level can do. Examples are given in the descriptions above of users at each level of the Framework.