THE EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE AND L2 LEARNERS WITH A LOW LEVEL OF EDUCATION Anne-Mieke Janssen-van Dieten23

(Council of Europe, 2001) is to achieve more coherence and harmony in the field of languages and comparability of language qualifications within the European Community. The core of the document consists of descriptions of communicative activities and matching descriptions of communicative language competence at six levels. Three types of language users are distinguished: Basic user, Independent user and Proficient user. The levels A1 (Breakthrough) and A2 (Waystage) are sublevels of the basic level. Within the levels of the Independent and Proficient user, sublevels B1 (Threshold) and B2 (Vantage), C1 (Effective proficiency and C2 (Mastery) are distinguished. A basic user is someone at an elementary level of competence, but who, in communication situations, is dependent on the willingness of the conversation partner to adapt to his/her level. An independent user is someone who is able to manage in everyday practice, can make himself/herself understood without too much effort and is in general able to understand speech spoken at a normal rate. Proficient users can communicate without any impediments. Along with the CEF a European Language Portfolio was developed. An official portfolio has to be validated by an international validation commission of the Council of Europe. Finally, in the DIALANG project checklists were developed for all languages within the European Union that enable people to assess their own level in terms of the CEF. 5.1 Concepts Underlying the Model The framework is based on different existing models for language competence and language use, among which Canale & Swain’s (1980) model is arguably the most influential one. North & Schneider (1998: 226) summarize the result as follows: “ … the scheme sees communicative language competence (linguistic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic) as a part of general human competences (including socio-cultural competence). Learners draw on these 23 Anne-Mieke Janssen was a member of the Department of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen; she retired some years ago