The Common European Framework in its political and educational context What is the Common European Framework?

Task familiarity: cognitive load may be lessened and successful task completion facilitated
according to the extent of the learner’s familiarity with:
•
the type of task and operations involved;
•
the theme(s);
•
type of text (genre);
•
interactional schemata (scripts and frames) involved as the availability to the learner
of unconscious or ‘routinised’ schemata can free the learner to deal with other
aspects of performance, or assists in anticipating text content and organisation;
•
necessary background knowledge (assumed by the speaker or writer);
•
relevant sociocultural knowledge, e.g. knowledge of social norms and variations,
social conventions and rules, language forms appropriate to the context, references
connected with national or cultural identity, and distinctive differences between the
learner’s culture and the target culture (see section 5.1.1.2) and intercultural aware-
ness (see 5.1.1.3).
Skills: task completion depends on the learner’s ability to exercise, inter alia:
•
the organisational and interpersonal skills necessary to carry out the different steps
of the task; 
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•
the learning skills and strategies that facilitate task completion, including coping
when linguistic resources are inadequate, discovering for oneself, planning and mon-
itoring task implementation;
•
intercultural skills (see section 5.1.2.2), including the ability to cope with what is
implicit in the discourse of native speakers.
Ability to cope with processing demands: a task is likely to make greater or lesser demands
depending on the learner’s capacity to:
•
handle the number of steps or ‘cognitive operations’ involved, and their concrete or
abstract nature;
•
attend to the processing demands of the task (amount of ‘on-line thinking’) and to
relating different steps of the task to one another (or to combining different but
related tasks).
7.3.1.2
Affective factors
Self-esteem: a positive self-image and lack of inhibition is likely to contribute to successful
task completion where the learner has the necessary self-confidence to persist in carry-
ing out the task; for example, assuming control of interaction when necessary (e.g. inter-
vening to obtain clarification, to check understanding, willingness to take risks, or, when
faced with comprehension difficulties, continuing to read or listen and making infer-
ences etc.); the degree of inhibition may be influenced by the particular situation or task.