CEFRL: this way out!

CECRL : par ici la sortie !

English translation of the following parts: Back cover, General introduction, Chapter 1.3.4.7. A deception and a stratagem, Chapter 3.6.2 Communicative approach and Action-Oriented Approach e in the CEFRL and CV proficiency grids (extract), Conclusion of the first part (extract), General conclusion and (related) Bibliography. 

By Bruno MAURER, Ordinary Professor of the University of Lausanne, EA739 Dipralang, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France), and Christian PUREN, Professor Emeritus of the University of Saint-Étienne (France), CEFRL: par ici la sortie ! Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2019, 6+314 p.

CEFRL: this way out! English translation of Bruno Maurer & Christian Puren, Par ici la sortie! (2019d): Back cover, General introduction, Chapter 1.3.4.7. A deception and a stratagem, Chapter 3.6.2 Communicative approach and Action-Oriented Approach e in the CEFRL and CV proficiency grids (extract), Conclusion of the first part (extract), General conclusion and (related) Bibliography.

In February 2018, the Council of Europe published, more than 15 years after the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (henceforth “CEFRL”), a Companion volume supposed to complete the 2001 document, with new scales of descriptors, especially for mediation. This late addition ignores all the criticisms of the CEFRL formulated in the meantime, as if this document were the definitive and unsurpassable reference in language-culture didactics. The first three parts of this book, CEFRL: This Way Out!, provide a close critique of these two publications, at the end of which it appears that the project of the CEFRL and its Companion Volume can be summarized in a few words: pretending to deal with teaching-learning-assessment, but in reality, working only to promote a limited and commercial form of assessment, namely certification. In the first two parts, the stranglehold of private interests on the European project of school language teaching is established, with supporting evidence, while the third part highlights the many theoretical and practical dead ends and inadequacies of the CEFRL, in particular its dependence on a single methodology, the communicative approach.

The last two parts outline two parallel ways out of the CEFRL, both from a resolutely plurimethodological perspective: an "integrated assessment" that takes into account all the issues at stake in the language teaching-learning process; and an "integrated plurilingual methodology" that draws on the already existing in terms of learners' language repertoires and on the already constructed in terms of knowledge about languages and language-learning competencies.

The "exit" of the CEFRL is now open, free and wide: the authors' wish is that researchers, trainers, publishers and teachers borrow it in great numbers, and develop it! (Back cover)

Also available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362717596.