Description:
This book presents the background to the current shift in language education towards action-oriented teaching and provides a theorization of the Action-oriented Approach (AoA). It contains a research-informed description of the AoA and explains its implications for curriculum planning, teaching, assessment and pedagogy.
Brief description:
Brian North is a researcher and consultant to the Council of Europe. After developing the CEFR levels and descriptors, he co-authored the CEFR itself, the prototype European Language Portfolio, and the manual Relating Language Examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2009), and coordinated the CEFR Companion Volume. Other project involvement includes Eaquals' core inventories (English and French), and more recently, investigation of CEFR use in Canada and Switzerland, alignment of the Canadian Language Benchmarks to the CEFR, and the ECML's CEFR QualiMatrix. Recent (co-)publications include The CEFR in Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Language Course Planning (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Action-oriented Approach (Multilingual Matters, 2019).
Review Quotes:
This book is a most valuable and timely contribution to the discourse concerning current and emerging paradigms for language education. It brilliantly merges reflections on current perceptions of action-oriented approaches to language teaching and learning and the recently revised and extended descriptors of the CEFR into stimulating and thought-provoking insights. Thoroughly researched, comprehensibly discussed, and also very much practice-oriented.
-- "Bernd Rüschoff, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany"