Chapter 8: “Policy Borrowing” and Compatibility: Critical Discourse Analysis on the CEFR, CEFR-J, and JF Standard

Since the enactment of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in 2001, the Framework has been used worldwide and is now available in thirty-nine languages (Council of Europe, 2012). Integrating the Framework into a Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) context, instructors in Europe and the Japan Foundation developed their own framework in 2010, called the JF Standard. A number of educational institutions in and outside of Japan are integrating the JF Standard into their curriculum and using it as an assessment tool that provides teachers and students with communicative competence (Arai et al., 2012; Fujinaka & Nakao, 2013; Komatsu & Yokoyama, 2012; Kumano, Ito & Hachisuka, 2013; Shibuya, 2013). This “policy borrowing” can be seen not only in a JFL context but also in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) setting in Japan. A handful of scholars in Japanese universities established a project team, discussing an “import” of foreign countries’ language policy. In 2012, they developed the framework for the EFL context in Japan, with extensive financial support from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Technology (MEXT). This CEFR-J has now been adopted by more than 1000 institutions in Japan, including both formal educational schools and other private language institutes.