The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages was published a decade ago and has been influential ever since, not only in its European 'home' but throughout the world. This book traces the processes of the influence by inviting authors from universities and ministries in 11 countries to describe and explain what happened in their case. There are everyday factors of curriculum development – which sometimes include coincidence and happenstance – and there are also traditions of resistance or acceptance of external influences in policy-making. Such factors have always existed in bilateral borrowing from one country to another but the CEFR is a supra-national document accessible through globalised communication. The book is thus not only focused on matters of language education but is also a Comparative Education case-study of policy borrowing under new conditions.
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages was published a decade ago and has been influential ever since, not only in its European 'home' but throughout the world. This book traces the processes of the influence by inviting authors from universities and ministries in 11 countries to describe and explain what happened in their case. There are everyday factors of curriculum development – which sometimes include coincidence and happenstance – and there are also traditions of resistance or acceptance of external influences in policy-making. Such factors have always existed in bilateral borrowing from one country to another but the CEFR is a supra-national document accessible through globalised communication. The book is thus not only focused on matters of language education but is also a Comparative Education case-study of policy borrowing under new conditions.
The Common European Framework of Reference: The Globalisation of Language Education Policy
296
The Common European Framework of Reference: The Globalisation of Language Education Policy
296eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages was published a decade ago and has been influential ever since, not only in its European 'home' but throughout the world. This book traces the processes of the influence by inviting authors from universities and ministries in 11 countries to describe and explain what happened in their case. There are everyday factors of curriculum development – which sometimes include coincidence and happenstance – and there are also traditions of resistance or acceptance of external influences in policy-making. Such factors have always existed in bilateral borrowing from one country to another but the CEFR is a supra-national document accessible through globalised communication. The book is thus not only focused on matters of language education but is also a Comparative Education case-study of policy borrowing under new conditions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847697325 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2012 |
| Series: | Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education , #23 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Michael Byram taught languages in secondary school and adult education. At Durham University since 1980, now emeritus, he has researched the education of linguistic minorities and foreign language education. His most recent book is From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship (Multilingual Matters) and he is the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning.
Lynne Parmenter is a Principal Lecturer in International Education at the Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. Until 2010, she spent 17 years teaching in schools and universities in Japan. Her main research interests are in global citizenship education and the negotiation of education policy and practice in the context of globalization.
Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus at Durham University, England. Having studied languages at Cambridge University, he taught French and German in school and adult education and then did teacher education at Durham. He was adviser to the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe and then on the expert group which produced the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. His research has included the education of minorities, foreign language teaching and intercultural competence, and more recently on how the PhD is experienced and assessed in a range of different countries.
Read an Excerpt
The Common European Framework of Reference
The Globalisation of Language Education Policy
By Michael Byram, Lynne Parmenter
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2012 Michael Byram, Lynne Parmenter and the authors of individual chaptersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-732-5
CHAPTER 1
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and its Background: A Case Study of Cultural Politics and Educational Influences
John L.M. Trim
The Common European Framework for Languages: learning, teaching and assessment (CEFR) was published, simultaneously in English and French – the two official languages of the Council of Europe – in February 2001 as a contribution to the European Year of Languages. Many of the values and attitudes which it embodies can be traced back at least to the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, with their concern for mass literacy and direct access to the Bible as the basis for independent thought and action, and particularly to the ideas of the great Czech educational thinker, Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) (1592–1670). Comenius saw his contemporaries in a war-torn Europe as trapped by ignorance in a labyrinth of appearances. Escape would only come through education, to make people aware of the unity and harmony of God's creation, into which human life should fit with spontaneous creativity, free from violence. Education should be a lifelong process, open to all, both men and women, on equal terms. Comenius saw language education as fundamental, starting with mother tongue literacy and oracy, then going on to the language of a neighbouring people and then to a language of universal communication, which in his time was still Latin. Language learning should not be a matter of formal exercises, but should be built upon sensory experience – where possible the experience and handling of real objects. Where not, as is most often the case in the world of the noindentlassroom, pictorial images must suffice. His Orbis Sensualium Pictus (the World of the Senses in Pictures, 1639) was not only a richly illustrated presentation of the vocabulary (words, phrases and sentences) of whatever language it was translated into, but also a guide to the exploration of the harmonious, divinely ordered world, from God, through the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, to man, first as a biological, then a social and then a moral and spiritual being, and thus back to God. Orbis Pictus, which remained popular in successive printings and adaptations for over a century (it was the only illustrated children's book available to Goethe as a boy), was essentially an illustrated version of Janua Linguarum Reserata (The Gate of Languages Unlocked, 1631). In a striking image, Comenius compared the progress of a language learner in stages, from infancy to full maturity, to the exploration of a palace, dealing successively with the skeletal structure of a language (vestibulum), the substantial body of the language and associated areas of knowledge and experience (janua), stylistic refinements bringing life and colour (atrium), then the works of more suitable and accessible authors (palatio) and finally the unlimited wealth of writings in the arts and sciences, to which language learning gave access (thesaurus). This was perhaps the first attempt to provide a comprehensive framework for language learning. In Didactica Magna (1633–38), and later Novissima linguarum methodus (1644–46), Comenius elaborated his educational theories in a systematic way, expanding simple but powerful concepts (language learning should be speedy, solid and enjoyable) into 187 axioms, many of which foreshadow contemporary thinking. The role of the learner is central. That of the teacher is to organise, motivate and direct learning in a disciplined, cooperative atmosphere. This demands the highest standards of morality, knowledge and understanding, and should be accorded a correspondingly high social status. Comenius' breadth of vision, humanity and common sense were an inspiration four centuries after his birth.
A more direct influence on the development of the CEFR was the great reform movement at the end of the 19th century, which was based on the Neogrammarian revolution in linguistics in the 1870s. The explosive development of comparative philology in the earlier part of the century had as its aim the reconstruction of the prehistory of the Indo-European languages. Around 1870, emanating from the University of Leipzig, the focus of scholarship shifted to the investigation of the historical processes leading to the present-day condition of languages. It became clear that the forces for change lay in the everyday use of spoken language. Written language was shown to be conservative, concealing the processes of change at least until it was established. Following the publication of Edouard Sievers' Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie (1871), phonetics became a powerful noindentool for the observation, notation and analysis of language in everyday use, an essential basis for understanding the dynamics of language change. Sound change was not arbitrary, but seemed to follow 'laws' that were analogous to those being discovered in the natural sciences: Gleiches wird unter gleichen Umständen gleich behandelt ('under the same circumstances the same entities are treated in the same way'). Phoneticians saw themselves as pioneering a scientific approach to human behaviour. This profound change in values, attitudes and beliefs was not confined to linguistics. It was part of a more general cultural movement, evidenced in the spread of Darwinism, positivism and the naturalist movement in literature, and driven by the sociocultural forces released by the Industrial Revolution.
This paradigmatic change brought the new linguists into sharp conflict with the values, attitudes, beliefs and practices of language teaching in the educational system. Since Latin had ceased to be the lingua franca of educated people across Europe, its teaching had become isolated from practical concerns, and it was seen as an intellectual discipline leading to an appreciation of the literary heritage of classical antiquity, existing only in the form of written texts. This pattern of study was transferred to modern languages, whose place in the curriculum was justified by the development in the modern era of national literary traditions which could stand alongside those of antiquity. The International Phonetic Association (IPA), formed in 1884, had the reform of language teaching as one of its main goals. To emphasise this aspect, its journal was entitled (until the 1960s) Le Maître Phonétique and always included a section Pour nos élèves, with brief phonetically transcribed texts for use in the classroom. The IPA attracted a number of leading linguists, notably Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen and Wilhelm Viëtor, the title of whose pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! (Language teaching must make a new start!) resounded through the educational world.
The differences between the classical and modern paradigms can be summarised in the following table:
[TABLE OMITTED]
It will be seen that the differences are profound and far-reaching. The reform movement encountered strong resistance and had mixed success. Perhaps under the influence of Otto Jespersen, or more probably owing to the differences in the respective cultures, the take-up of the modern paradigm was faster and longer-lasting in Scandinavia than in the Mediterranean countries and in the teaching of English as a foreign language than in that of other languages. In some countries, modern aims and methods were considered suitable for those destined to fill the middle ranks of society, but not for its higher echelons (perhaps an echo of Plato's distinction between techne and episteme). Foreign languages were, in any case, considered irrelevant and unsuitable for the broad mass of the working population. In Britain, over a period of time between the two world wars, modern aims and methods were introduced widely into lower secondary education, but not into higher education. Upper secondary education lay between the two, but, since school-leaving qualifications were in the hands of university examination boards, the forms of assessment that were used strongly favoured the classical approach. Under Paul Passy and Daniel Jones, the influence of the IPA was strong but limited. Many schools used a phonetic method in noindenthe first months of teaching French, and the Department of Phonetics at University College London continued to hold courses for language teachers for many years, but its influence in university teacher training departments waned in the late 1930s. UCL also offered research into language teaching methodology at postgraduate level, though the offer was rarely taken up. This probably dated from Harold Palmer's tenure of a lectureship in the department from 1914 to 1923, when he left for Japan. Though his tenure was short, his influence was long-lasting. His Grammar of Spoken English on a Strictly Phonetic Basis (1924) was still being used as the core text for courses held in the 1950s, as was his Everyday Sentences in Spoken English (1935), which was written with Blandford. The sentences were functionally categorised and provided with intonation patterns in Palmer's own notation, developed, probably under Henry Sweet's influence, for the Grammar of Spoken English. These works, together with his robust promotion of the modern paradigm in his published lectures and his work on vocabulary control, leading to The Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary, (1952), completed, edited and published by A.S. Hornby, and the General Service List of English Words, edited by Michael West in 1953, were an important background and provided input to the work of the Council of Europe.
The two world wars in the first half of the 20th century seriously disrupted international communication at all levels, as did continuing financial and administrative restrictions during the period of post-war reconstruction. In the absence of opportunities for genuine communication with native speakers, foreign language teaching in schools became introverted and reverted to the classical paradigm, to which qualifying examinations were orientated. In Britain and the United States, this tendency increased due to their physical isolation from the continent of Europe and the fact that many teachers were émigrés, out of sympathy with contemporary life in the countries concerned. In Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the wartime alliance and the lowering of the 'Iron Curtain' in 1948, international communication for ordinary citizens became impossibly difficult. In the immediate post-war situation, the main impetus for modernisation came from the United States, under the influence of Leonard Bloomfield, whose work Language (1933) was the primary linguistic textbook. Bloomfield was essentially a Leipzig-trained neogrammarian, and a staunch adherent of the modern paradigm, as the greater part of his work shows. Late in life he embraced behaviourist psychology and its doctrine of learning by habit formation. His pupils and successors developed this into 'post-Bloomfieldian structuralism'. Languages were analysed as an ascending series of systems, in which distinctive units were combined into permitted structures, starting with the phonemes of the language and their permitted noindentombination into syllabic structures. Then came the morphemes, the minimal meaningful units and their combination into words and finally the combination of words into a hierarchically ordered sequence of syntactic structures to form sentences. Language learning was thought to follow the same path. First the learner should master the phonemic system, overlearning to the point at which habits of sound recognition and production were so well established that they no longer required conscious attention. Then the same methods led to the mastery of the morphemic system and of syntactic structures of increasing complexity. The aim (similar to that of military weapon training) was to make the basic mechanisms of language so instinctive that all attention could be concentrated on how best to express and understand meaning. The main problems in learning appeared to be caused by differences between the units and structures of the learner's mother tongue and the target language, which could be identified by contrastive analysis and given special attention in the learning programme. This theory provided the basis for the 'audio-lingual method' developed by linguists, notably Charles Fries, Robert Lado and Charles Ferguson, and taught by them and their followers with energy and enthusiasm to language teachers, particularly of English as a foreign language, around the world, funded by various aid programmes and notably the Fulbright scheme. Audiolingual courses, with tapes containing dialogues to be repeated and learnt by heart, followed by appropriate structural exercises, were marketed on a large scale.
In Europe, the teaching of languages other than English was at first little affected by these developments. However, the learning and teaching of English as a language of global communication made enormous strides in the post-war period. The outcome of the war had left Anglo-American forces in control of the major lines of communication across the globe. The language was in increasing use in ports and airports everywhere and hence in international trade. Firms found it economical to use one single language in dealing with clients in a number of different countries and the growing number of multinational concerns found it useful to have that language as its operating language, internally as well as externally. The process, once under way, was of course self-reinforcing, so that growth in the use of English language was exponential. The reason for the increasing learning and use of English was utilitarian, strongly favouring the modern paradigm, despite resistance from older teachers concerned with the maintenance of educational values and standards. In adult education, in which the demand for English was very strong, there were no such inhibitions. There was, however, some tension between the tightly controlled American structuralist approach and the less formal methods, which were strongly noindentnfluenced by Palmer and Hornby, promoted by the British. Since it was universally accepted that foreign learners should model themselves on native usage, the tension also extended to which native model, general American or British RP, should be followed.
The first formal proposals to modernise language teaching in European educational systems came from the Council of Europe on the initiative of the French government, taken perhaps as a reaction to the rapid erosion of the position of French as the language of diplomacy and international institutions and in international relations more generally. The Council of Europe was founded in 1949, in the uncertain conditions following the divisive and ominous events of 1948, with the main aim of protecting human rights, the rule of law and pluralist parliamentary democracy. Membership was and is open to all European countries accepting these principles and it has steadily grown over the years, particularly since 1990, to include all European states, including all members of the European Union (from which it is quite distinct) and the successor states to the USSR (except those in Central Asia). As an intergovernmental organisation it has no directive powers and works mainly by consensus, but its Committee of Ministers can make Recommendations to member states and its work can lead to European Conventions, in the light of which national legislation is harmonised and amended. As the European political situation has stabilised, the Council has increasingly worked to promote and coordinate international cooperation in tackling common problems facing European society in all fields except defence and to foster social progress in Europe. Its work in the language field is based on the European Cultural Convention, signed in Paris in 1954. Under Article 2, each member state undertakes to promote the study of its own language, history and civilisation and that of other contracting parties in its own territory and that of others, and to grant similar facilities to them. This formulation indicates that the Convention was conceived within the classical paradigm, but in fact the activities of the Council have consistently promoted modernisation. In many ways, their purpose and effect may be seen as the achievement of the aims and objectives of the reform movement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Common European Framework of Reference by Michael Byram, Lynne Parmenter. Copyright © 2012 Michael Byram, Lynne Parmenter and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Introduction - Michael Byram and Lynne Parmenter
The Common European Framework of Reference: Learning, Teaching, Assessment
1. John Trim: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and its Background: A Case Study of Cultural Politics and Educational Influences
Part 1: The CEFR in Europe
France
2. Francis Goullier: Policy Perspectives from France
3. Veronique Castellotti: Academic Perspectives from France
Germany
4. Henny Rönneper: Policy Perspectives from Germany
5. Adelheid Hu: Academic Perspectives from Germany
Bulgaria
6. Maria Stoicheva: Policy Perspectives from Bulgaria
7. Maria Stoicheva and Pavlina Stefanova: Academic Perspectives from Bulgaria
Poland
8. Pawel Poszytek: Policy Perspectives from Poland
9. Hanna Komorowska: Academic Perspectives from Poland
Commentary on the European Cases - Michael Byram and Lynne Parmenter
Part 2: The CEFR beyond Europe
America
Argentina
10. Melina Porto and Silvana Barboni: Policy Perspectives from Argentina
11. Melina Porto: Academic Perspectives from Argentina
Colombia
12. Beatriz Peña Dix and Anne-Marie de Mejía: Policy Perspectives from Colombia
13. Anne-Marie de Mejía: Academic Perspectives from Colombia
USA
14. Jacqueline Van Houten: Policy Perspectives from the USA
15. Heidi Byrnes: Academic Perspectives from the USA
Asia-Pacific
China
16. Weicheng Zou: Perspectives from China
Japan
17. Masako Sugitani and Yuichi Tomita: Perspectives from Japan
Taiwan
18. Jessica Wu: Policy Perspectives from Taiwan
19. Hintat Cheung: Academic Perspectives from Taiwan
New Zealand
20. Glenda Koefoed: Policy Perspectives from New Zealand
21. Adèle Scott and Martin East: Academic Perspectives from New Zealand
Commentary on Cases beyond Europe - Lynne Parmenter and Michael Byram
Conclusion - Lynne Parmenter and Michael Byram