EU funds EDIA’s efforts towards automated readability assessment in NL, DE and ES — EDIA

Why does the CEFR matter?

The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment) aims to provide a comprehensive learning, teaching, and assessment method that can be used for all European languages. Indicating the level of learners of foreign languages in Europe and beyond, the CEFR facilitates the assessment of a person’s language proficiency. By now, most are familiar with the six reference levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2) used for this purpose.

CEFR levels are the foundation for a communicative approach to (foreign) language acquisition, teaching, and certification. Although the CEFR levels represent a widely supported approach, the availability and quality of educational content labelled with CEFR levels are limited. That’s because the highly laborious, error-prone labelling process is performed manually (save for some exceptions). This results in several practical obstacles regarding publishing, teaching, and learning:

• Content creators (publishers, authors, and teachers) struggle to use consistent criteria for checking a text’s difficulty level.

• Schools and teachers have trouble finding and/or creating appropriate texts for their students.

To tackle this problem, we have developed an automated text classification technology using natural language processing. This technology can perform CEFR text levelling in a scalable, consistent manner for multiple languages at a very granular level.

By removing blockers through automation, we expect to impact the practical application of CEFR, enabling the labelling of more content in less time in a highly consistent manner. This way, we will lay the foundation for making educational resources with properly labelled text levels more widely available, adhering to the CEFR standard. After all, practical obstacles will have been eliminated.