Il Profilo della lingua italiana: Livelli del QCER A1, A2, B1, B2

(di Barbara Spinelli e Francesca Parizzi)

The Profilo della lingua italiana. Livelli del QCER A1, A2, B1 e B2 is the outcome of the European Project Reference Level Descriptions (RLD's) for national and regional languages, which was promoted by the Language Policy Division in collaboration with the CVCL (Center of language assessment and certifications) of the University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy. This project was conceived to fulfill the needs of language teachers, syllabi designers, language assessors, and language certification centers. All these users encountered many difficulties in the implementation of the CEFR descriptors due to the specific nature of languages. As a matter of fact, while the CEFR describes the more general learning goals of language speakers, the RLD's (e.g. Il Profilo della lingua italiana, The English Profile, Profile deutsch) describe how these goals can be achieved - level by level of the CEFR - in terms of communicative and linguistic competences (i.e. through texts, grammar, lexicon, and linguistic functions).

Therefore, the Profilo della lingua italiana is a CEFR supplementary instrument that is extremely useful for teachers who need to design pedagogical and assessment paths aimed to achieve the CEFR language proficiency levels or to obtain language certificates as well as for authors of textbooks and pedagogical materials.

The Profilo della lingua italiana consists of a book and a CD Rom that describes the project, gives examples of language learners' oral and written productions for each proficiency level of the CEFR, and provides descriptors for the following communicative and linguistic competences:

  • genres (e.g. texts that language learners can tackle in reception, production and written and oral interaction such as leaflets, timetables, tourist guide, emails, everyday life brief conversations)
  • grammar
  • general notions (vocabulary needed to describe semantic domains such as space, time, quantity)
  • specific notions (vocabulary needed to describe semantic domains such as home, spare time, entertainment)
  • linguistic functions (linguistic exponents needed to carry out functions such as describing, telling, and getting information)
  • word frequency list (learning vocabulary by frequency from A1 to B2 level)

All the materials described above are now available on the following CVCL's site:

https://www.unistrapg.it/profilo_lingua_italiana

Please cite the above work as:

Spinelli B. e Parizzi F. (2010) Profilo della lingua italiana. Livelli di riferimento del QCER A1, A2, B1, B2, Firenze, La Nuova Italia/ RCS Libri.