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

No 1.
Expert: Someone is asked to write the scale, which they may do by consulting
existing scales, curriculum documents and other relevant source material,
possibly after undertaking a needs analysis of the target group in question.
They may then pilot and revise the scale, possibly using informants.
No 2.
Committee: As expert, but a small development team is involved, with a larger
group as consultants. Drafts would be commented on by consultants. The
consultants may operate intuitively on the basis of their experience and/or on
the basis of comparison to learners or samples of performance. Weaknesses of
curriculum scales for secondary school modern language learning produced
by committee in the UK and Australia are discussed by Gipps (1994) and
Scarino (1996; 1997).
No 3.
Experiential: As committee, but the process lasts a considerable time within an
institution and/or specific assessment context and a ‘house consensus’
develops. A core of people come to share an understanding of the levels and
Appendix A: developing proficiency descriptors
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the criteria. Systematic piloting and feedback may follow in order to refine the
wording. Groups of raters may discuss performances in relation to the
definitions, and the definitions in relation to sample performances. This is the
traditional way proficiency scales have been developed (Wilds 1975; Ingram
1985; Liskin-Gasparro 1984; Lowe 1985, 1986). 
Qualitative methods:
These methods all involve small workshops with groups of informants and a
qualitative rather than statistical interpretation of the information obtained.
No 4.
Key concepts: formulation: Once a draft scale exists, a simple technique is to chop
up the scale and ask informants typical of the people who will use the scale to
(a) put the definitions in what they think is the right order, (b) explain why
they think that, and then once the difference between their order and the
intended order has been revealed, to (c) identify what key points were helping
them, or confusing them. A refinement is to sometimes remove a level, giving
a secondary task to identify where the gap between two levels indicates that a
level is missing between them. The Eurocentres certification scales were
developed in this way.