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

part-whole relations;
componential analysis;
translation equivalence.
Users of the Framework may wish to consider and where appropriate state:
•
what grammatical elements, categories, classes, structures, processes and relations
learners will need/be equipped/required to handle.
Users of the Framework may wish to consider and where appropriate state:
•
what morphological elements and processes the learner will need/be equipped/required to
handle.
The user/learner’s competences
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Grammatical semantics deals with the meaning of grammatical elements, categories,
structures and processes (see section 5.2.1.2).
Pragmatic semantics deals with logical relations such as entailment, presupposition,
implicature, etc.
Questions of meaning are of course central to communication and are treated passim in
this Framework (see particularly section 5.1.1.1).
Linguistic competence is treated here in a formal sense. From the point of view of
theoretical or descriptive linguistics, a language is a highly complex symbolic system.
When an attempt is made, as here, to separate out the many different components of com-
municative competence, knowledge (largely unconscious) of and ability to handle formal
structure is legitimately identifiable as one of those components. How much, if indeed
any, of this formal analysis should enter into language learning or teaching is a different
matter. The functional/notional approach adopted in the Council of Europe publications
Waystage 1990, Threshold Level 1990 and Vantage Level offers an alternative to the treatment
of linguistic competence in Section 5.2.1–3. Instead of starting from language forms and
their meanings, it starts from a systematic classification of communicative functions and
of notions, divided into general and specific, and secondarily deals with forms, lexical and
grammatical, as their exponents. The approaches are complementary ways of dealing
with the ‘double articulation’ of language. Languages are based on an organisation of
form and an organisation of meaning. The two kinds of organisation cut across each other
in a largely arbitrary fashion. A description based on the organisation of the forms of
expression atomises meaning, and that based on the organisation of meaning atomises
form. Which is to be preferred by the user will depend on the purpose for which the
description is produced. The success of the Threshold Level approach indicates that many
practitioners find it more advantageous to go from meaning to form rather than the more
traditional practice of organising progression in purely formal terms. On the other hand,
some may prefer to use a ‘communicative grammar’, as for example, in Un niveau-seuil.
What is clear is that a language learner has to acquire both forms and meanings.
5.2.1.4
Phonological competence 
involves a knowledge of, and skill in the perception and production of:
•
the sound-units (phonemes) of the language and their realisation in particular con-
texts (allophones);
•
the phonetic features which distinguish phonemes (distinctive features, e.g. voicing,
rounding, nasality, plosion);
•
the phonetic composition of words (syllable structure, the sequence of phonemes, word
stress, word tones); 
•
sentence phonetics (prosody)
•
sentence stress and rhythm
•
intonation;
Users of the Framework may wish to consider and where appropriate state:
•
what kinds of semantic relation learners are equipped/required to build up/demonstrate.
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment
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•
phonetic reduction
•
vowel reduction
•
strong and weak forms
•
assimilation
•
elision.