Adapting the CEFR to Italian CLIL Teacher Language

In the last 20 years, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has rapidly made its way into the classrooms of Europe. It is now offered in different forms in mainstream education in most European Union member states. Nevertheless, despite the rapid development of this educational approach, some issues have not received due attention. One of the more neglected questions is that of the definition of the foreign language needed by content teachers working within the CLIL framework. When these competences are raised, any description is mostly limited to a generic list of abilities accompanied by reference to one of the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This chapter proposes an examination of this issue in relation to the Italian educational context, in which the new figure of the CLIL teacher has recently been created. It first offers a survey of the CEFR and its purpose as a flexible tool of reference. A brief review of the methods and approaches available for adapting the Framework to specific contexts is also given, together with a short description of some projects of CEFR descriptor revision. The chapter concludes with the outline of a project to adapt the CEFR descriptors to meet the language needs of CLIL teachers in the specific CLIL context. The objective of the project is to aid effective CLIL training and evaluation for content teachers planning to teach within this framework.