Abstract

This paper aims at introducing the Common European Framework ( CEF) – an important achievement in terms of theory as well as practice of foreign language teaching and learning in Europe. Coming into existence at the beginning of this century, CEF has been used popularly in Europe and it has been considered a consistent foundation for building curriculums, designing textbooks, constructing tests, and issuing certificates approving competence of many foreign languages in Europe as well as other Asian countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. As such, CEF has been chosen to be one of the research concerns in the project "Improving of English language training programs in VNU-HCM”, and this paper is one of the particular results of the above researching process. The paper includes 2 main parts: Part I provides an introduction of CEF (history of development and objectives of CEF, major components of CEF, and present applications of CEF in the field of teaching foreign languages in the world); Part II presents suggestions to improve the curriculum designing and output assessing of English subject (all of these suggestions are based on CEF as a common framework), and to upgrade the quality and effectiveness of English language training programs in VNU-HCM. From the successes of using CEF of European countries, we believe that the implementation of CEF in Vietnam and the use of EICAS 1 (a product of the project of VNU HCM in collaboration with British Council and Cambridge ESOL) to assess the output level. of students will soon, for certain, bring positive effects to the improvement of English teaching quality in VNU-HCM.