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. Dear Colleagues,I deleted four slides from the beginning of my presentation, for time reasons. From the panel discussion on the HSK, it seems they were very relevant.These slides follow, plus a comment on the linking of the HSK to the CEFR.Best wishesBrian North. The CEFR is about:. Profilin
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1. The CEFR: Follow up on HSK Brian North
ChaF2010, Zürich, 2nd September 2010
2. Dear Colleagues,
I deleted four slides from the beginning of my presentation, for time reasons.
From the panel discussion on the HSK, it seems they were very relevant.
These slides follow, plus a comment on the linking of the HSK to the CEFR.
Best wishes
Brian North
3. The CEFR is about: Profiling not Levelling
4. Profiling The label A2 is always a convenient summary of a complex profile.
(Whether you are talking about a person or an exam)
5. Relating exams to the CEFR The Council of Europe has produced a Manual of procedures for relating exams to the CEFR.
This Manual proposed:
Building an argument with evidence, following recommended procedures:
Specification, Standardisation, Validation
Reporting a profile of the exam against CEFR levels. Many exams are not A2
A template is given; a completed, real example is given (next slide)
6. A real CEFR exam profile
7. CEFR and HSK: a comment The CEFR was not designed for oriental languages. However, common Can Do descriptors across language have been used in the US to describe ability in oriental as well as European languages since the 1950s.
Apparently no evidence for the linking has been published; it is not clear whether any standard-setting methodologies (either those recommended by the Manual or others in the literature) were used.
For Chinese and other oriental language, CEFR level (in relation to existing CEFR descriptors) is clearly very different for:
listening and speaking, with European script as reference
reading and writing, with Chinese characters
One solution would be for HSK to claim one CEFR level for L & S, one for R and one for Wr to profile itself as recommended.
The second solution (used by Eurocentres Beijing and Kanasawa) is only to claim & report a CEFR level for listening and for speaking (plus perhaps to state number of characters learnt or words in Chinese script learnt).
The third solution would be to develop new reading and writing scales. The problem here is that (a) this is more complicated than it sounds and (b) they may well be different for different oriental languages, creating confusion.