In this talk, Leung will discuss the concept and operationalization of plurilingualism and plurilingual mediation in the CEFR-CV (2020) and how this aligns to relevant data.
There is increasing awareness that the use of more than one language in social interaction should be recognised as part of speakers' language repertoires. The expanded notion of plurilingual (multilingual) mediation in the CEFR Companion Volume (2020) can be seen as a welcome acknowledgement of this important aspect of language communication in contemporary contexts. Research in the fields of code-switching, English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism and translanguaging points to the fluid and contingent nature of real-life multilingual interaction. The main focus of this talk is on the complex relationship between the conceptualisation and operationalisation of plurilingualism and data of plurilingualism-in-use. l will first give an account of the characterisations of the constructs of plurilingualism and plurilingual mediation in the CEFR-CV (2020). I will then look at the ways in which these constructs have been operationalised in some of the proficiency descriptors with reference to plurilingualism-in-use. After that I will explore the commensurability between these proficiency descriptors and empirical data from recent research. In the final part of the discussion I will make some observations about the need to interrogate the alignment between concept (and its operationalisation) and relevant data.
