Foreword to the Special Issue “The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for English Language Assessment in China” of Language Testing in Asia

Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Background The need within language testing and assessment for specifications of test content, methods and constructs has long been recognised and accepted. In education more generally, statements of aims, objectives and curricular frameworks are also widely provided, although the definitions and operationalisations of these may vary greatly. In second and foreign language education, there is a long tradition of stating expected levels of achievement, with or without reference to curricular objectives. However, such stated levels were often vague and were not defined independently of higher or lower levels. Hence, it was very common to use terms like Beginner, False Beginner, High or Low Intermediate and Advanced or Mastery, the meanings of which were interpreted very differently in different contexts, cultures and educational systems, such that one person’s or system’s “False Beginner” might be another’s “Intermediate”. More recently, efforts have been made to define achievement levels in terms of the requirements of educational contexts or of learners’ needs and their ability to function independently in particular settings (see, for example, the Threshold level developed by language specialists under the aegis of the Council of Europe in the 1970s or the Vantage and Mastery levels in the 1980s). Draft versions of the Common European Framework of Reference were developed in the 1990s, which speculated on or stated what learners at particular levels could do with the particular language being assessed. The DIALANG suite of diagnostic language tests in 14 European languages (https://dialangweb.lancaster.ac.uk/) was based on a draft (1996) version of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and used Can Do statements taken from the CEFR as its basis for test item development and the reporting of test results. Partly as a result of the success and take-up of DIALANG, the CEFR was rapidly adopted in many European educational systems, and CEFR-based exit levels from secondary or higher education were required by law in some countries (e.g. the Austrian Ministry of Education and the University of Innsbruck as reported in Spöttl et al. 2016). This requirement to use the CEFR was not without controversy (see Fulcher, 2004, for example, or Weir, 2005), but their arguments were largely ignored by language