ABSTRACT

The CEFR was conceived as part of the Council of Europe’s project ‘Language Learning for European Citizenship’. The social and political context out of which this project grew has often been lost from view. This is perhaps due to the success of the CEFR not only within Europe but also worldwide. That success is largely due to the quality of the scaling of competences in the CEFR. The CEFR is used for planning and evaluating curricula, certifications, examinations, textbooks and so on. There is however little attention to the political context of its past and the possible scenarios of its future. Here I locate the CEFR in its political context and purpose, and analyse some of the ideas of its origins. Although time has passed, the contemporary socio-political situation in Europe is such that we should attend to the educational philosophy of the CEFR and consider how it and its companion volume, can be part of the response of language teaching to the demands of our time. Finally, I demonstrate how language teaching can take a proactive role in, and have a much closer relationship with, (active) citizenship and a European, internationalist education for citizenship.

摘要

CEFR 是欧洲委员会“欧洲公民语言学习”项目的一部分。这个项目发展的社会和政治背景经常被忽视。这可能是由于 CEFR 不仅在欧洲而且在世界范围内都取得了成功。这一成功很大程度上归功于 CEFR 能力扩展的质量。CEFR 用于规划和评估课程、认证、考试、教科书等。然而，很少有人关注其过去的政治背景和未来的可能情景。在这里，我将 CEFR 定位于其政治背景和目的，并分析其起源的一些想法。虽然时间过去了，在欧洲当代社会政治形势下，我们应该关注 CEFR 的教育理念，并考虑它及其配套卷如何成为语言教学响应我们时代需求的一部分。最后，我展示了语言教学如何在（积极的）公民和欧洲的国际主义公民教育中发挥积极作用，并与之建立更密切的关系。