Responding to the CEFR Alignment Handbook: Sharing experience of alignment activities and reflecting on lessons learned

In February 2020, a conference entitled “The CEFR: Towards a Road Map for Future Research and Development”, co-sponsored by EALTA, UKALTA and the British Council, was hosted by the British Council in London (O’Dwyer et al. 2020, Little and Figueras 2022). The organizing institutions recognized the need to explore ways of developing research methodologies and projects of various kinds that could help to extend and further develop the CEFR and its implementation. It was hoped that the conference would inform the development of a road map for future engagement with the CEFR, taking account of what had been learnt so far and of new developments in applied linguistics and related disciplines. Participants in the February 2020 conference agreed on the need for a new Handbook to support the alignment of language education with the CEFR and its Companion Volume. Accordingly, the three organizations behind the conference, together with ALTE, developed Aligning Language Education with the CEFR: A Handbook, publishing it online in April 2022 (Figueras et al. 2022). In undertaking to produce the Handbook, the steering group (which emerged from the February 2020 event) recognized that alignment applies not only to language tests but to policy, curriculum guidelines, curricula, syllabuses, textbooks and other teaching/learning resources. The group also decided that the Handbook should serve to inform policy makers, teacher educators, teachers and other language education stakeholders, as well as supporting the more or less technical processes on which alignment depends. The Handbook also seeks to help users to navigate the wide range of CEFR-related reference documents.