The Council of Europe in Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education proposed three objectives for democratic citizenship: plurilingualism of citizens to develop a degree of communicative ability in some languages over their lifetime, the linguistic diversity of languages and mutual understanding, intercultural communication as well as the acceptance of cultural differences. In order to achieve those goals, we need innovative practices promoting multilingual and intercultural education. Mediation is a key competence in the multilingual society, as it enables individuals to overcome communicative barriers and leads to a better understanding of one another. Developing mediation competence is a response to the requirements of quality education comprising: development of competences, knowledge, attitudes, a variety of learning experiences and construction of individual and collective identities. Its goal is to make teaching more effective and to improve social cohesion. Intercultural competence helps understand otherness, establish affective and cognitive links between new and past experiences of otherness and mediate between various members of social groups and their cultures.
These most recent innovative developments in the field of language teaching, learning and assessment were refined in the CEFR/CV (2018). Its main methodological message implies that the learner is to be viewed as a social, plurilingual and pluricultural language user, whose learning process has to be driven by action and task, and whose assessment is to be guided by their communicative ability in real-life situations. The key position in the action-oriented approach does hold MEDIATION.
The CEFR/CV(2018) contains detailed descriptors referring to mediation activities and strategies. The document serves as the basis for the work of foreign language teachers; it is used to create course programs and to verify learning outcomes. Its latest version describes in detail which mediation-related competences should be mastered by learners at particular levels of proficiency.