Discourse or structure? Operationalising the CEFR Companion Volume’s four communicative modes as learning outcomes in Turkish as a Foreign Language curricula

Research on the CEFR’s transfer into national settings shows that its proficiency levels are adopted more readily than its model of language use and that transfer is therefore selective. This study examines that selectivity in the curriculum documents in which the framework is converted into learning outcomes; it asks whether institutional curricula for Turkish as a foreign language carry the Companion Volume’s four communicative modes, reception, production, interaction and mediation, into their outcomes. Ten curricula published by four institutional actors between 2012 and 2025 were coded at sub-scale level with a sixteen-field protocol and assigned to profiles according to an explicit rule. Seven curricula organise their outcomes by the four traditional skills, while two adopt the four-mode architecture in part. One curriculum, published in 2025, organises its outcomes by the four modes and documents the components of mediation it leaves out. Citing the Companion Volume did not predict profile: three of the four curricula that cite it include no mediation outcomes. The study offers a transferable document-analysis protocol, evidence that a curriculum for a non-European target language can be structured on the four-mode model, and a distinction between documented and silent exclusion in the framework’s transfer into local curricula.