Creating Your Own Descriptors Selection

| Action-oriented Approach|Plurilingualism|Tech-mediated

Going deeper into descriptors 🔍

Descriptors simplify complex processes to provide practically useful tools to develop transparent objectives. They are a heuristic not a standard. The fundamental aim is to reorient language education towards real-life competences and to facilitate an alignment between planning, materials development, teaching and assessment. In the case of the new categories of descriptors in the CEFR Companion Volume, there is also a deliberate aim to broaden the scope of language education to take account of the fact that language learning classrooms are no longer homogenous; there are always many different languages and cultures present in today’s classrooms, hence the addition of descriptors for mediation and for plurilingual/pluricultural competence.

For an international common framework like the CEFR, the descriptors obviously need to be context-free and to apply to any language, which means that they lack detail. This is a good thing: very detailed specifications would be a straitjacket. That means that descriptors therefore sometimes need to be adapted to the context concerned. Read this article entitled The CEFR illustrative descriptor scales (Brian North, 2007), which discusses these issues. (Note: the Phonology scale was replaced in the 2020 update in the CEFR Companion Volume).

Using descriptors ⚙️

Now that you have an idea of the issues surrounding descriptors, read the CEFR Companion Volume Sections 2.8 and 2.9 on the illustrative descriptors. This gives a summary of how the CEFR descriptors were developed (for both the 2001 and 2020 editions) and ways in which they can be used

A checklist of selected ‘can do’ descriptors for a particular level can be very useful for the following purposes:

as source material in the design of a curriculum
to analyse the needs of a group or person and set priorities
to list objectives, explain priorities and invite discussion
to source materials
to set priorities for linguistic content
to help learners to understand why they are learning certain things
to select appropriate communicative tasks
to recommend specific self-study activities
to discuss progress with individual learners
to refocus learners’ attention and motivation halfway through a course
to report on-going progress to parents
to decide if the class as a whole or a single individual has achieved the level concerned
to document achievement at the end of a course.

If such a checklist is sued for self-assessment, it is not a good idea to have much more than a dozen descriptors. For self-assessment, rather than a “Yes, I can do this” and “No, I can’t”, it is usual to have three columns, for example

Yes, I can do this / Yes, I can do this with some help / No, I can’t do this yet
Yes, I can generally do this / Yes, I can do this in familiar situations and with people I know / No, I can’t do this yet
Yes, I can do this / Yes, I am currently working on this / No, I can’t do this yet.

Look again at the examples of descriptors given in the previous section (AALE infosheet Introduction to Descriptors) and think of a language (not the one you teach!). Think of yourself as a learner of that language. Use the ‘rating scale’ (Yes, I can do this / Yes, I can do this with some help / No, I can’t do this yet) to describe your ability in relation to each descriptor.

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