This talkintroduces the development of China’s Standards of English (CSE), including itsrationale, framework, development procedures, and validation.

There are severalproblems regarding the coherence and consistency of the current curriculums,the situation of teaching to the tests and too many tests without commonreference. The China State Council issued a document in September, 2014 todevelop a national foreign language assessment system. With the development ofCSE, English learning, teaching and testing in China will be put into the sametrack with the same scale.

Based on the communicative languagecompetence model (Bachman 1990; Bachman & Palmer 1996) and the use-orientedprinciple, the CSE defines the English language competence for the Chinese EFLlearners. The English language competence is divided into comprehensioncompetence and expression competence. Considering the Chinese EFL context, theability of mediation between English and Chinese, i.e. the translationcompetence and the interpretation competence, is also included in theframework.

Standards for the Chinese EFLlearners are defined in different levels with a set of “can-do” statements(Council of Europe 2001; Pearson 2016). An online platform was built to collectdescriptors, three rounds of cross-group review were conducted andquestionnaires were doubled reviewed and trialed to ensure the quality. Severalseminars, conferences and group discussions were held.

CSE follows the principles of being specific, scientific,operational and practical, and is supposed to be published by the end of 2017.