Broadening the Scope of Language Education: Mediation, Plurilingualism, and Collaborative Learning: the CEFR Companion Volume (original) (raw)

Abstract

The CEFR’s action-oriented approach, including its concept of the user/learner as a social agent mobilising a plurilingual repertoire, represents a significant development from the communicative approach. The CEFR moves beyond the traditional four skills (spoken and written reception and production) to also include interaction and mediation, opening to a complex vision of the situated and integrated nature of language learning and language use. Advances in research highlight the need to overcome a vision of languages as stable, pure objects existing outside their speakers/users and a reductive view of learning as an internal cognitive process, meant to prepare for later real-life use. These theoretical advances have been flanked by bottom up developments bringing a more dynamic vision of language education that engages more meaningfully with the principles of the CEFR. The time was therefore ripe to complete the CEFR descriptive apparatus with new descriptors for mediation and pluri...