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A CEFR core curriculum

An inventory to be used alongside CEFR descriptors will help both

teachers and learners of English to set priorities, says Dr Brian North

THE BRITISH Council and the European Association for Quality

Language Services (Eaquals) have come together to create a core

curriculum inventory for Common European Framework of Reference for

Languages (CEFR) levels A1 to C1 for English. The curriculum inventory

was launched at the British Council on 11 November as part of the

Eaquals yearly special interest project workshop, which took place in

London this year from 11 to13 November.

Although curriculum content for CEFR levels has been defined for

German, French and Spanish, and the English Profile project will use

corpora to document learner language, no curriculum content summary

yet exists for English. Meanwhile, the ELT profession has no easily

available reference as to what the main teaching and learning content for

the different levels might be. Yet many schools, examination boards and

publishers have aligned their levels to the CEFR. Eurocentres (an Eaquals

founder member) and the British Council Milan were among the first

schools to do so, and Eaquals has gone on to develop a scheme for its

member schools with a fully implemented CEFR-related curriculum to

issue certificates of CEFR achievement to their learners.

The core curriculum has been created with teachers and adult

learners of general English in mind. The aim was to produce an inventory

that can be used alongside CEFR descriptors by both teachers and

learners to set priorities. Like the CEFR itself, it is intended as a reference

tool. In any particular context the teacher (or learner) needs to adapt and

complement the core to meet the needs of learners. It is not intended to

guide course developers or examination bodies, for whom the moredetailed specifications Waystage (A2) Threshold Level (B1) and Vantage

Level (B2) are already available.

The result of the project is:

a summary chart (A3 size) listing core functions, grammar, lexis,

discourse markers and topic areas for levels A1 to C1;

the mapping of the relevance of core language problems across

the levels, as in the example shown above for modals;

a set of prototype scenarios depicting real-world contexts thatcluster CEFR can do descriptors of outcomes, CEFR criteria defining

quality, and different aspects of enabling competences including

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