Coming Full Circle —From CEFR to CEFR-J and back

Abstract

The CEFR-J project was launched in Japan in 2008. The CEFR-J gives a set of Can Do descriptors for 10 CEFR sub- levels (Pre-A1 to B2.2) and related Reference Level Description (RLD) work, whilst including developed profiling for vocabulary, grammar, and textual features were developed. In this article, the English resources created for the CEFR-J are applied in preparing teaching resources for other major European languages as well as Asian languages. To achieve this, a series of teaching/learning resources including the CEFR-J Wordlist and Phrase List initially developed for English were translated into 27 other languages using neural machine translation. These translated word and phrase lists were then manually corrected by a team of language experts. The automatic conversion of English to other languages was evaluated against human judgments as well as frequency analysis referencing web corpora. Three types of e-learning resources were created, taking into consideration the wordlists and the phrase lists for teaching those languages to undergraduate students: (1) a flash-card app for learning vocabulary, which allows for classification by both thematic topic and CEFR level, (2) an online syntax writing tool for the study of grammar and vocabulary, and (3) an online spoken and written production corpus collection tool. Keywords: CEFR-J, multilingual resources, e-learning, machine translation, automatic conversion, NLP, multilingual corpora, web-based, writing tool, spoken production