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The Emphasis of Cultural Awareness in the European Framework

The idea that language education needs to integrate cultures has emerged itself in the curriculums, plans, materials designed in many countries. Kramsch (2011) states that “The adjective ‘intercultural’ has been applied to competences, speakers, learning, pedagogy, stances.” (p.308). She also indicates that the aim of intercultural communication is to ease the interaction in the European Union and countries support each other within Europe. Adopting the intercultural way of language teaching has helped to reach out to many learners and with cultural awareness; their identities have not been disregarded. That is one of the language learning and teaching aspects that the Council of Europe included in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in 2001. Having been used as a source to develop and design nationwide curriculums in language teaching by European countries and countries such as Mexico, Canada and Japan, CEFR states that “It describes in a comprehensive way what language learners have to learn to do in order to use a language for communication and what knowledge and skills they have to develop so as to be able to act effectively.” (Council of Europe, 2001, p.1). To promote culturally enriched language learning, the terms plurilingualism and pluriculturalism were introduced and expanded as the repertoires needed while developing linguistic and cultural communication (Council of Europe, 2018). Both of these terms imply that language learning has an active nature and plurilingualism involves participating in the language starting from one's own social circle and expanding that involvement into the society. As attitudes beyond linguistic skills take part in communication such as gestures, tones, body language, or other interaction mediators like understanding social and cultural cues, the learner develops pluricultural awareness and does not just practice the four skills of language classroom.
Since its launch, CEFR has been used in thirty languages not specifically restricted to the European area, and European organizations have been using its six common reference levels in language measurement (Little, 2012). Little (2012) also indicates that one of the aims of CEFR is to raise intercultural and pluricultural awareness and help learners monitor their own competences while learning languages. Within the perspective of CEFR, language learners are regarded as ‘social agents’ who are active both in language learning and contributing to their community to develop language awareness (Council of Europe, 2001). CEFR adopts an actionoriented approach to guide the social agents, so that the learners would be able to act within their social environment through their plurilingual and pluricultural competences. Moreover, general and communicative language competences are emphasized as the essentials to improve this social agency. Therefore, while students become socially and linguistically attentive participants of language environments with the help of intercultural awareness, they can organize their own language learning process.
In CEFR, the learner in a cultural environment is culturally aware and can construct cooperative skills. “Seeing learners as plurilingual, pluricultural beings means allowing them to use all their linguistic resources when necessary, encouraging them to see similarities and regularities as well as differences between languages and cultures.” (Council of Europe, 2018, p.27). Learners have social and cultural skills that help them reconcile through cultural distinctions within their own community or across multiple regions. North and Piccardo (2017) describe cultural mediation of CEFR as an aspect happening for a language or for many languages along with an inclusion of cultural differences of communities, and social mediation as a bridge between speakers who would face difficulties during interactions. Through the guidance of CEFR on social and cultural use of language, language materials and syllabi are designed with the intention to improve pluricultural and plurilingual competences. Moreover, CEFR has become influential in curriculum design and teaching perspectives (Byram & Parmenter, 2012) such as valuing students’ social cultural backgrounds and organizing authentic materials to promote pluriculturalism and plurilingualism. In addition to taking learners’ cultural diversities into consideration, teachers have become aware of arranging tasks and putting more action oriented approach into language planning. Adequate education should be delivered to teachers so that plurilingualism and pluriculturalism values of CEFR can be applied accurately (Diez-Bedmar & Byram, 2019) . Hence, every individual in the classroom can be a part of a thorough CEFR cycle when appropriate design and teaching which address the needs, levels and background of the learners are done.