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23 - Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

from Part V - Pedagogical Interventions and Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2019

John W. Schwieter
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Alessandro Benati
Affiliation:
American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
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Summary

In the decades following the Second World War, there was a strongly felt need on both sides of the Atlantic to find ways of describing L2 proficiency in terms of functional capacity—the ability to perform communicative tasks in the real world—rather than grammatical knowledge. In the wake of wars against Japan and Korea, the United States government wanted to be able to gauge what its employees could do in the L2s they had learnt; in Europe, a major challenge was to enable adult language learners to develop communicative repertoires sufficient to support mobility. This chapter focuses on the two most influential instruments to emerge from this reorientation of L2 education, the Proficiency guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL PG; ACTFL, 1986, 2012a; Breiner-Sanders et al., 2000; Breiner-Sanders, Swender, & Terry, 2002) and the Council of Europe’s Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR), originally published in the organization’s two official languages, English and French (Council of Europe, 2001a, 2001b).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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