Teaching mediation in the foreign language classroom

The paper Teaching mediation in the foreign language classroom concerns itself with mediation as one of the communicative activities or modes of communication defined by the Common European Frame of Reference for Languages' Companion Volume and the possibilities of teaching mediation as part of teaching foreign languages, French in particular. Its principal aims are to familiarise language teachers and other language education professionals with the essentials of mediation and to provide teachers with a mediation task creating manual including mediation- oriented lesson plans for French language teaching. The theoretical part of the paper deals with how mediation is represented in the Common European Frame of Reference for Languages and in the Companion Volume, as well as with mediation tasks, their characteristics, types, and the parameters that need to be considered when planning mediation teaching. The practical part consists of two stages. The first is an analysis of mediation tasks published in various contemporary French language textbooks based on criteria established in the theoretical part of the paper. The other describes mediation-oriented French lessons taught on the basis of lesson plans designed as part of the present thesis to four groups of secondary school students with varying...