Mediating Concepts: the Official CEFR Descriptors from B2 to C1
Mediating concepts is one of the three mediation families described in the CEFR Companion Volume (2020): facilitating others' access to knowledge and ideas, particularly in collaborative settings — leading group work, building meaning together, guiding understanding of a new notion. It is a core skill for teamwork and teaching.
At B2, you actively facilitate group work by rephrasing and restarting the discussion. C1 adds the ability to structure complex collective reasoning, synthesise contributions from multiple participants, and guide a group towards a shared understanding of abstract notions. This page reproduces every official descriptor for this activity at B2, B2+ and C1, scale by scale.
The official descriptors, scale by scale
4 Companion Volume scales cover mediating concepts between B2 and C1. For each one, the B2 and C1 descriptors are shown side by side; where the CEFR publishes B2+ descriptors, they appear in the amber transition band.
Collaborating to construct meaning
B2 — independent user
Can further develop other people’s ideas and opinions.
Can present their ideas in a group and pose questions that invite reactions from other group members’ perspectives.
Can consider two different sides of an issue, giving arguments for and against, and propose a solution or compromise.
C1 — proficient user
Can frame a discussion to decide on a course of action with a partner or group, reporting on what others have said, summarising, elaborating and weighing up multiple points of view.
Can evaluate problems, challenges and proposals in a collaborative discussion in order to decide on the way forward.
Can highlight inconsistencies in thinking, and challenge others’ ideas in the process of trying to reach a consensus.
B2+ — transition zone
Can highlight the main issue that needs to be resolved in a complex task and the important aspects that need to be taken into account.
Can contribute to collaborative decision making and problem solving, expressing and co-developing ideas, explaining details and making suggestions for future action.
Can help organise the discussion in a group by reporting what others have said, summarising, elaborating and weighing up different points of view.
Managing interaction
B2 — independent user
Can explain the different roles of participants in the collaborative process, giving clear instructions for group work.
Can explain ground rules of collaborative discussion in small groups that involves problem solving or the evaluation of alternative proposals.
Can intervene when necessary to set a group back on task with new instructions or to encourage more even participation.
C1 — proficient user
Can organise a varied and balanced sequence of plenary, group and individual work, ensuring smooth transitions between the phases.
Can intervene diplomatically in order to redirect discussion, prevent one person dominating or confront disruptive behaviour.
B2+ — transition zone
Can organise and manage collaborative group work efficiently.
Can monitor individual and group work non-intrusively, intervening to set a group back on task or to ensure even participation.
Can intervene supportively in order to focus people’s attention on aspects of the task by asking targeted questions and inviting suggestions.
Facilitating collaborative interaction with peers
B2 — independent user
Can ask questions to stimulate discussion on how to organise collaborative work.
Can help define goals for teamwork and compare options for how to achieve them.
Can refocus a discussion by suggesting what to consider next, and how to proceed.
C1 — proficient user
Can show sensitivity to different perspectives within a group, acknowledging contributions and formulating any reservations, disagreements or criticisms in such a way as to avoid or minimise any offence.
Can develop the interaction and tactfully help steer it towards a conclusion.
B2+ — transition zone
Can, based on people’s reactions, adjust the way they formulate questions and/or intervene in a group interaction.
Can act as rapporteur in a group discussion, noting ideas and decisions, discussing these with the group and later giving a summary of the group’s view(s) in a plenary.
Encouraging conceptual talk
B2 — independent user
Can formulate questions and feedback to encourage people to expand on their thinking and justify or clarify their opinions.
Can build on people’s ideas and link them into coherent lines of thinking.
Can ask people to explain how an idea fits with the main topic under discussion.
C1 — proficient user
Can ask a series of open questions that build on different contributions in order to stimulate logical reasoning (e.g. hypothesising, inferring, analysing, justifying and predicting).
B2+ — transition zone
Can encourage members of a group to describe and elaborate on their thinking.
Can encourage members of a group to build on one another’s information and ideas to come up with a concept or solution.
The Examiner's Perspective
Réda Haiat — CEFR Assessment Expert · 22 Years of Experience
A B2 mediator leads the construction of meaning: restarting, synthesising, moving things forward. A C1 mediator works on the other person's thinking itself — perceiving where the reasoning is stuck, why it's stuck, and choosing the angle that will unstick it. This is no longer facilitation — it's cognitive coaching.
The marker is the ability to diagnose before explaining. A B2 mediator rephrases when something isn't understood; a C1 mediator first identifies what's actually in the way — a flawed assumption, an implicit premise, mismatched vocabulary — and tailors the intervention to that diagnosis. The C1 descriptors describe a fine-grained reading of the other person's understanding process.
With 10 descriptors out of 30, B2+ takes up a third of the corpus here — the most spread-out transition of the seven activities. That fits the nature of the skill: coaching someone else's thinking is acquired by degrees, situation by situation, rather than in one clean break.
What I listen for at the boundary
- Does the mediator diagnose the obstacle before explaining, or rephrase straight away?
- Do they perceive the implicit assumptions blocking understanding?
- Do they adapt the angle of explanation, or just repeat it differently?
- Do they draw out the other person's reasoning, or substitute their own?
- Do they know how to leave a pause, or do they always fill the silence?
Frequently asked questions
How many official descriptors cover mediating concepts between B2 and C1?
30 official descriptors cover this zone: 12 at B2, 10 at B2+ and 8 at C1, spread across 4 scales. All of them are reproduced on this page.
What does the B2+ level mean?
B2+ is a CEFR "plus level": it describes a strong B2 competence, beyond the B2 threshold but not yet meeting the C1 criteria. The Companion Volume publishes specific descriptors for these intermediate bands — that is the transition zone shown between the B2 and C1 columns.
Can I reuse these descriptors?
Yes. The CEFR descriptors are published by the Council of Europe under the CC BY 4.0 licence: you may reproduce and adapt them, including commercially, provided you credit the Council of Europe. That is exactly what this page does.
Going further
Sources
- Council of Europe — CEFR Companion Volume (2020): https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989
- The CEFR on the Council of Europe website: https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/