Common Framework of Reference for Intercultural Digital Literacies

What it is

CFRIDIL is a comprehensive set of guidelines to systematically describe levels of proficiency for students and European citizens across Europe and other countries.

It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.

CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.

These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.

If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.

Who wrote it

The design of CFRIDiL is the last phase of the project and built on the data emerged from the first two years of the EU-MADE4LL project, plus the one- year pilot project (2014-2015) and pre-pilot project (2009-2010). It also draws from the expertise of an international group of teachers and scholars who have highly recognized experience in multimodality, digital literacy, and computer mediated discourse for global communication.

The AIM of CFRIDiL and its relations with DigComp 2.0 and CEFR

The Common Framework of Reference for Intercultural Digital Literacies applies a set of guidelines modelled on CEFR and DigComp2.0, by providing precise indications about what one can do at each level (e.g. design a blog, understand how content is organized in a web page, produce a video curriculum, etc. designed specifically to communicate with an international and intercultural audience).

The CFRIDiL is a definite step towards standardisation of digital skills by promoting transparency and recognition for the evaluation of what a European citizen should know to be a successful communicator in today’s digitally-connected world and with the final goal of facilitating learning, employability and labour mobility.

CFRIDiL is presented to academia and the labour market for future uses and further research, an invaluable tool for teachers, parents, practitioners, recruiters in the field of education, digital literacy and society on a large scale.
Its uses and applications are potentially very vast, and are not limited to the world of higher education. It is a powerful tool to experiment on teaching, learning and assessing critical digital literacy in the context of international and intercultural communication, also in terms of standardised practices and common grounds in an area, such as digital literacy, that is much debated and studied, but needs to be taught more systematically and effectively across different disciplines. It is a tangible advancement in the state of the art of critical digital literacy and it will prove a useful and flexible tool based on a robust theoretical framework and validated empirically via multiple practical experimentations.