8768 SILT 36 (M2989).indd

A decade after the publication of the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2001), practitioners’ relationship with this fundamental tool is still rather ambivalent and certainly not homogeneous. Very often teachers feel hesitant, asking themselves if what they are doing is consistent with the CEFR guidelines. This scenario, with some minor variations, can be observed in several European countries. This contribution discusses some of the major concepts which constitute the new vision introduced by the CEFR, focusing on their impact on teaching practice. In particular, the data collected during the piloting phase of the project entitled Encouraging the culture of evaluation among practitioners: The case of language teachers (ECEP) is presented. These were quite homogeneous in various contexts despite di! erences in teaching/learning cultures. Finally, the article explains how the project builds on these results in order to produce a tool, Pathways through assessing, learning and teaching in the CEFR (Piccardo, Berchoud, Cignatta, Mentz and Pamula 2011), to support teacher educators in building a more complex vision of language teaching and learning.