The CEFR Companion Volume: Framework Overview is an essential update to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, first published in 2001. This volume enriches the original framework by introducing new concepts and more detailed descriptors, making it an even more comprehensive guide for language learning, teaching, and assessment. It reflects the evolving landscape of language use, emphasizing areas like mediation, plurilingualism, and online interaction.
What is the CEFR Companion Volume: Framework Overview?
The CEFR Companion Volume extends and updates the existing CEFR illustrative descriptors. It addresses requests for new descriptors in areas like mediation, reactions to literature, and online interaction, and also provides versions for young learners and signing competences. Furthermore, it offers more detailed coverage for A1 and C levels.
This update builds upon the CEFR's success and its foundational research, ensuring its continued relevance in promoting reflective learning and learner autonomy. It’s not about replacing the 2001 CEFR but enriching its descriptive apparatus.
Key Updates and Additions in the Companion Volume
Several significant changes and additions define the new Companion Volume:
- New Descriptor Scales: Introduced for mediation, reactions to literature, and online interaction.
- Modality-Inclusive Descriptors: Adapted to be gender-neutral and applicable to sign languages, with specific scales for signing competences.
- Expanded Levels: More fully defines “plus levels” and a new “Pre-A1” level.
- Detailed Descriptions: Elaborates on listening and reading in existing scales and adds descriptors for activities like using telecommunications and giving information.
- Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competence: Highlights this innovative area, which was not fully developed in the 2001 edition.
The CEFR's Core Aims and Action-Oriented Approach
The CEFR aims to improve the quality and effectiveness of language education. It promotes language teaching and learning as a means of communication, empowering the learner as a “social agent” who acts and exerts agency in the social world and the learning process.
Implementing the Action-Oriented Approach
The action-oriented approach views language as a vehicle for communication, not merely a subject to study. It drives learning towards enabling learners to perform real-life tasks. This means designing curricula based on real-world communicative needs, using “can do” descriptors to communicate aims to learners.
Key implications for the classroom include:
- Learner Involvement: Engaging learners as social agents, using descriptors for communication.
- Social Nature of Learning: Recognizing the interaction between social and individual learning.
- Extensive Target Language Use: Learning to use the language rather than just learning about it.
- Plurilingual Resources: Allowing learners to use all their linguistic resources, noting similarities and differences across languages.
- Purposeful, Collaborative Tasks: Focusing on task outcomes (e.g., planning an outing, creating a blog) rather than solely on language itself.
This approach places the co-construction of meaning (through interaction) at the heart of the learning process, often involving collaborative interaction among learners.
Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competence Explained
The Companion Volume further develops the crucial concepts of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, which are distinct from simple multilingualism.
Plurilingualism vs. Multilingualism
- Multilingualism: Refers to the coexistence of different languages at a social or individual level (e.g., a country with multiple official languages, or an individual who knows several languages in isolation).
- Plurilingualism: Describes the dynamic and developing linguistic repertoire of an individual user/learner. It emphasizes a single, interrelated repertoire that users flexibly combine with general competences and strategies to accomplish tasks. This competence is often uneven and changing, with resources varying greatly across languages.
Benefits of Developing Plurilingualism and Pluriculturalism
Developing these competences offers several advantages:
- Enhanced Sociolinguistic and Pragmatic Competences: Exploits and further develops existing skills.
- Metalinguistic Awareness: Leads to a better understanding of linguistic organization across different languages.
- Improved Learning Capacity: Refines the ability to learn and interact with others in new situations, potentially accelerating future linguistic and cultural learning.
- Cognitive Advantages: Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research supports cognitive benefits, such as enhanced executive control in the brain.
The CEFR Descriptive Scheme: Beyond Four Skills
The CEFR introduces a descriptive scheme that moves beyond the traditional