Putting the Plurilingual/Pluricultural back into CEFR: Reflecting on Policy Reform in Thailand and Malaysia (original) (raw)

In recent years, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has spread far beyond the borders of Europe and become a point of reference for language teaching in a variety of contexts. It has seen particularly wide-spread use in Asia, with Malaysia and Thailand recently joining the already large number of nations using the framework. There are, however, often significant differences between the values of the Council of Europe (CoE) that CEFR was intended to represent and the values that underpin its uses in non-European contexts. In particular, while CEFR was intended to usher a new ‘post-communicative’ era in language teaching, centred on the promotion of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, Thai and Malaysian policy positions it as an instrument for reinforcing the existing ‘communicative’ orientation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the contrasts between the ‘communicative’ and ‘post-communicative’ educational philosophies and to outline an alternative, CEFR-compatible agenda for policy reform.