COMMUNICATIVE-INTERCULTURAL APPROACH AND THE PARADIGM OF IMMEDIACY (Threshold levels from 1975, CEFR 2001, Companion Volume 2018)

Abstract

The thesis of this article is that the Companion Volume of the CEFR, published in February 2018, could not propose, contrary to its authors' main objective, satisfactory modes of assessing mediation competence because its authors had not really become aware of, or at least not questioned, the paradigm of immediacy dominant in methodological thinking about language teaching since the methodology, significantly called "direct", of the early years of the twentieth century. A critical analysis of its descriptors is carried out here, with particular reference to the "genes" that the communicative-intercultural approach has inherited from its global reference situation, the tourist journey, namely the inchoative, the punctual, the perfective and the individual, all of which are incompatible with the mediation paradigm. In the final analysis, this blockage on the part of the authors of the Companion Volume can be explained by their essential objective, which is to propose modes of assessment compatible with the tests proposed by the international certification bodies that have been monitoring the Council of Europe's linguistic guidelines for almost half a century: these tests must "provide assessors with a 'snapshot', an im–mediate photograph of the candidates' language competences; in both senses of the word, i.e., by means of an extrapolation based on performances achieved (1) on the spot, without delay, in an (2) unmediated way, with no other intermediary between the candidates and the language to be produced, than the supports and instructions of the assessment system alone".

N.B. This text is translated from the original French "Approche communicative-interculturelle et paradigme de l’immédiation (Niveaux Seuils à partir de 1975, CECR 2001, Volume complémentaire 2018)", (2020g/). This translation was published in January 2024.