Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
In November 2001, a European Union Council Resolution recommended using the CEFR to set up systems of validation of language ability.
The Council of Europe's authoring team emphasized that the CEFR was not written primarily as a framework for assessment and test development.
Brian North, one of the authors of the CEFR team, addressed such criticisms in a Guardian article in 2004: The Council of Europe (COE) fully respects the diversity of educational and assessment systems in its 45 member states.
[7] General and particular communicative competencies are developed by producing or receiving texts in various contexts under various conditions and constraints.
[citation needed] A language user can develop various degrees of competence in each of these domains and to help describe them, the CEFR has provided a set of six Common Reference Levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2).
Multiple organisations have been created to serve as an umbrella for language schools and certification businesses that claim compatibility with the CEFR.
The Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) is a consortium of academic organisations that aims at standardising assessment methods.
[15] In Germany, Telc, a non-profit agency, is the federal government's exclusive partner for language tests taken at the end of the integration courses for migrants, following the CEFR standards.
The French Academy Baltimore suggests the following different equivalence:[23] A study by Buck, Papageorgiou and Platzek[24] addresses the correspondence between the difficulty of test items under the CEFR and ILR standards.
[30] The ACTFL standards were developed so that Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Superior would correspond to 0/0+, 1/1+, 2/2+ and 3/3+, respectively on the ILR scale.
For example, the Vancouver English Centre provides a comprehensive equivalence table between the various forms of the TOEFL test, the Cambridge exam, the VEC level system, and the CEFR.
Differences in estimation have been found to exist, for example, with the same level on the PTE A, TOEFL, and IELTS, and is a cause of debate between test producers.
[91] The CEFR, initially developed to ease human mobility and economic growth within the highly multilingual European Union, has since influenced and been borrowed by various other areas.
In Japan, the adoption of CEFR has been encouraged by academics, institutional actors (MEXT), politicians, business associations, and by learners themselves.
[93] In Vietnam, adoption of the CEFR has been connected to recent changes in English language policy, efforts to reform higher education, orientation toward economic opportunities and a tendency for administrators to look outwards for domestic solutions.
Additionally, existing descriptors have been refined to more accurately reflect the nuances of language use and to address any identified gaps since the original CEFR publication.
In contrast, the scales under Relational Mediation focus on the processes of establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships to create a cooperative environment.
In the CEFR-CV, pronunciation at C2, for example, is described as follows:Can employ the full range of phonological features in the target language with a high level of control – including prosodic features such as word and sentence stress, rhythm and intonation – so that the finer points of their message are clear and precise.
