What are the different levels of the CEFR for French proficiency

The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) defines six levels to describe French language proficiency:

• A1 (Beginner): Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases.
• A2 (Elementary): Can communicate in simple tasks requiring direct information exchange.
• B1 (Intermediate): Can deal with most situations while traveling and produce simple connected text.
• B2 (Upper-Intermediate): Can interact fluently and spontaneously, understand the main ideas of complex text.
• C1 (Advanced): Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic, and professional purposes.
• C2 (Proficient): Can understand virtually everything heard or read and express themselves spontaneously with high precision.

These levels are used for teaching, learning, and assessing French proficiency across Europe and globally. ¹

References

• Linguistic correlates to communicative proficiency levels of the CEFR: The case of syntactic complexity in written L2 English, L3 French and L4 Italian

• Productive collocation knowledge and advanced CEFR-levels in Swedish as a second language: A conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell, Lindqvist & Edmonds (2018)

• Linguistic correlates to communicative proficiency levels of the CEFR : The case of syntactic complexity in L2 English and L3 French

• Subordination, subject-verb agreement and the CEFR: An analysis of linguistic complexity and accuracy in written L2 English and L3 French in relation to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

• The L2 proficiency level effect in L3 lexical learning: high-proficiency L2s do not transfer

• TCFLE-8: a Corpus of Learner Written Productions for French as a Foreign Language and its Application to Automated Essay Scoring

• Phraseological indices of writing proficiency at the B2 vs. C1 levels in an ESP learner corpus: Implications for language testing for academic purposes

• How Will Alberta’s Second Language Students Ever Achieve Proficiency? ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, the CEFR and the “10,000-Hour Rule” in Relation to the Alberta K-12 Language-Learning Context.

• L1 French learning of L2 Spanish past tenses: L1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues

• On cross‐linguistic variation and measures of linguistic complexity in learner texts: Italian, French and English

• Experiments with Universal CEFR Classification

• Experiments with Universal CEFR Classification

• Predicting CEFRL levels in learner English on the basis of metrics and full texts

• L2 Learners’ Proficiency Evaluation on CEFR Criteria using Recognition-Taguchi Method

• Towards a deeper understanding of the CEFR principles in grammar competence testing

• THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR LANGUAGES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

• Multidimensionality of assessment in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR)

• EvalYaks: Instruction Tuning Datasets and LoRA Fine-tuned Models for Automated Scoring of CEFR B2 Speaking Assessment Transcripts