The Languages Company

A starting point for discussion is likely to be the work of the Council of Europe, and specifically The Common European Framework of Reference, which is much more than a set of level descriptors.  It is a comprehensive description of the processes of teaching, learning and assessing languages.   As well as the text itself a summary and background information can be found on the Council of Europe website.

Although the Framework claims to be neutral as far as any particular methodology is concerned and does indeed provide the means to analyse a wide range of approaches to language learning, it is clearly based in the context of the Council of Europe’s earlier work on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), much of which was published only in paper versions.   There are however a number of useful summaries of CLT on the web .  This is something that we will be developing further in the coming year.