Application of the CEFR to an Arabic Corpus: A Case Study

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) was developed by the Council of Europe and first published in 2001. It has since evolved significantly and new volumes have been published; most recently, the CEFR Companion Volume (CEFR/CV) in 2020. The CEFR aims to provide the basis for L2 learning, teaching, and assessment of European languages. However, it has been widely used around the world in non-European contexts. This article presents a case study of the application of the CEFR to an Arabic corpus comprising 214 texts produced by first year students at Zayed University in the UAE, which is part of a bilingual corpus in Arabic and English. This article focuses on the application of the CEFR to the Arabic texts which posed specific challenges, including Arabic diglossia whereby there are two distinct varieties of the language used for writing and speaking. Furthermore, the complexities of Arabic grammar include that it has formal features which only appear in writing. There is also some overlap between Arabic and other languages, particularly English, as many English expressions are used in everyday life in Arab societies. These factors, among others, lead to unique issues to consider when applying the CEFR to a written Arabic corpus. However, due to the generic nature of the CEFR descriptors, they have been applied successfully to the assessment of the Arabic written corpus, which provides the basis for further applications of the CEFR to other competencies in Arabic and to other non-European languages. This article describes the process of rating the corpus, outlines the practical implications of the application of the CEFR to an Arabic written corpus and presents an overview of student performance mapped across the six CEFR levels