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

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 plurilingual/pluricultural competence. This article outlines the conceptualisation, development and validation of these descriptors and their publication in the CEFR Companion Volume (2018), alongside a text clarifying the paradigm shift in language education implied by the notion of the user/learner as a plurilingual/pluricultural social agent. The goal is to promote quality, inclusive education for all, and in particular to further the recognition and valorisation of linguistic and cultural diversity and the promotion of plurilingual interculturality.