Abstract Language is essential for mastering academic subjects. Yet whether and how subject-specific discourse is mastered alongside subject-learning remains understudied. There is, therefore, urgency to delineate tools which (1) help teachers objectively gauge how well students have mastered discipline-specific notions in an L1 or an L2, and (2) design instruction which caters to such holistic academic achievement. Here, we propose, and illustrate, how one such tool can be achieved by extending the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Descriptors into discipline-specific instruction. CEFR-descriptors from levels A1 to C2 lack explicit reference to cognitive processes needed for mastering the linguistic particularities of individual disciplines. Transnational collaboration between language- and content-experts enabled by a European Commission COST Action entitled CLIL Network for Languages in Education, headed by the University of Vienna ( https://www.clilnetle.eu/ ), used authentic upper-secondary level content to structure a ‘framework-of-descriptors’ which explicitly link CEFR-levels to specific cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) needed for achieving level-appropriate and content-specific linguistic competence. We illustrate how this CEFR/CDF-Descriptor-Framework is relevant for evaluating student writings and is thus relevant for multilingual education in Europe and beyond. The full report on which this study is based is available at (Lorenzo, Francisco, Lidija Cvikić, Ana Llinares, Mark de Boer, Emine Adadan, Roberto Arias-Hermoso, Dorothea Bagalová, Marko Ćaleta, Suheyla Demirkol Orak, Natalia Evnitskaya, Dubravka Glasnović Gracin, Adrián Granados, Irene Guzmán-Alcón, Michalina Kasprzak, Sami Lehesvuori, Lina Miloshevska, Hüseyin Özdemir, Valentina Piacentini, Elena del Pozo, Helena Roquet & Teresa Ting. 2024. Assessing Disciplinary Literacy with CEFR Descriptors: History, Mathematics and Science. A Report by CLILNetLE Working Group 2 , https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:2082900 ).
Lorenzo et al. (Sat,) studied this question.