Reference Level Descriptions (RLDs) for national and regional languages

The Council of Europe has opted for helping to produce these instruments to complement the CEFRas part of its mainstream work. The descriptions must comprise the following common features:

• because the description of each level for each language emanates from the same document: the CEFR;
• because, together with the CEFR, the Manual for relating language examinations to the levels of the CEFR) and the videos/CD-Roms giving samples of levels for the setting of certification tests), these descriptions are one of the anchor points proposed by the Council of Europe’s Language Policy Unit for the development of language programmes that are consistent with one another, from one language to another and also with the common tools which already exist;
• because their convergence alone can give them credibility and make it worth people’s while to use them. It is unrealistic to imagine that the development of these reference descriptions, which select and distribute a certain verbal material by level of competence, can be based solely on “scientific” procedures: their audience will also depend on the consensus they are able to generate among the professionals concerned, especially as the Framework leaves decision makers the responsibility of specifying the morpho-syntactic material (See user box on page 115 in the English edition (CUP) of the CEFR).

Similarly to and following on from the threshold level, these CEFR level description by language are intended to provide extra legitimacy for languages which need to demonstrate that they can be taught and that their teaching can be defined in clear technical terms. More...