Learn French - CD-vel [antikvár]

pj^lm^:;!- V; fv W w !{l - ' ^ ''y^j THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR LANGUAGES I When, exactly, can someone say they "speak" a foreign language? When can they i claim to speak it "correctly" and fluently? Language mastery is an issue that has long I exercised educationalists and linguists. It might have remained a topic of academic i debate, and language acquisition just another subject on the educational curricu- I lum, were it not for the fact that today's learners need to demonstrate or prove the ^ i skills they have acquired, especially when working in a professional environment, ^ applying for a job, or even migrating to another country. i Various systems and scales have been developed to measure language proficiency, I including the International English Language Testing System (lELTS), the ALTE I Framework and, in the United States, the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the ILR i Scale.* I In the European Union, which has more than 20 official languages (among the 120 I or so spoken throughout Europe as a whole), the assessment issue was a particular- !ly critical question. That is why the Council of Europe in 2001 designed the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The main purpose of I this initiative was to provide a method for learning, teaching and assessing that ap-I plies to all European languages so that they can be learned and practised more easily. Another ofthe original aims ofthe CEFRL, in addition to encouraging Europe's citizens to travel and to interact with each other, was to put some order into the multiple private assessment tests that were in use at the time and that, in most cases, were specific to just one language. More than 15 years after the CEFRL was rolled out, it has proven hugely successful, not only in Europe but throughout the world. Now available in some 40 languages, the framework is widely used by educators, course designers, human resource managers and companies, who "find it advantageous to work with stable, accepted standards of measurement and format"^*.