The fifth and final workshop of the CEFR Online Workshop Series in 2023 is entitled "Putting mediation into practice" will take place on Thursday, 30 November 2023 from 16.00 until 18.30 CET.

This workshop will start by briefly recapping the conceptualisation of mediation in the 2014-18 project, which developed the CEFR Companion Volume. In this first part, participants will reflect on the potential of mediation in their own context, highlighting aspects most relevant to their practice. Prompted by selected descriptors, participants will then discuss core implications of mediation. Then, in the main activity of the workshop, participants will select descriptors and use them to inform the development of a classroom activity. This will be followed by a guided discussion on the ways in which mediation-informed activities enrich classroom discourse and student learning.

The workshop will be moderated by Enrica PICCARDO and Brian NORTH.

Dr Piccardo is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. A collaborator with the Council of Europe (CoE) since 2008 and co-author of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), she has coordinated international research projects on language teaching innovation and teacher education in Canada and Europe. She has presented in numerous countries and in different languages and has published extensively, both scholarly articles/books and publications for teachers. Among her recent publications are The Action-oriented Approach: A Dynamic Vision of Language Education (2019) with Brian North and The Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education (2021) co-edited with A. Germain Rutherford and G. Lawrence.

Dr North has been a researcher and consultant to the Council of Europe since 1991. After developing the CEFR levels and descriptors in his PhD in a Swiss National Science Foundation project, he co-authored the CEFR itself, the prototype European Language Portfolio, the manual for relating assessments to the CEFR, and the CEFR Companion Volume. Other CEFR-related projects include investigation of CEFR use in Canada and Switzerland, alignment of the Canadian Language Benchmarks to the CEFR and the ECML’s CEFR QualiMatrix. Publications include: The Development of a Common Framework Scale of Language Proficiency (2000: Peter Lang); The CEFR in Practice (2014: Cambridge); Language Course Planning (with M. Angelova, E. Jarosz & R. Rossner: 2018: Oxford), and The Action-oriented Approach (with E. Piccardo, 2019: Multilingual Matters).

The working languages of the workshop are English and French.

Please register here.

Download the Background reading.