Action-oriented, Plurilingual and Intercultural Education: A new association – API Forum

Despite developments over the past 20 to 30 years in theories that inform language education, the predominant pedagogical approach in English Language Teaching (ELT) has not changed radically since the introduction of the coursebook-dominated ‘mature version’ of communicative language teaching (CLT) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the field, the CEFR appears to have been perceived mainly as a set of proficiency levels and descriptors (common reference points) to guide assessments, provide standards and align planning, teaching and assessment. In great part, implementation of the CEFR overlooks the action-oriented, plurilingual approach to language education advocated in the 2001 original, and even more so in the 2020 CEFR Companion Volume. After outlining why that might be the case and briefly summarising the key aspects of the CEFR pedagogic vision – action-orientation, the social agent, mediation and plurilingualism – this article introduces a new international association for language educators and researchers, API Forum, dedicated to promoting, implementing, researching and further developing this vision.