In the Framework book the students and teacher of a certain language

are referred as language learners and language users respectively. The

language learner becomes plurilingual and develops interculturality.
Learners are also enabled to mediate, through interpretation and
translation, between speakers of the two languages concerned who
cannot communicate directly.
It has long been recognized that language in use varies greatly
according to the requirements of the context in which it is used.
Each act of language use is set in the context of a particular situation
within one of the domains in which social life is organized.
The domains are divided into four , which are:

the personal domain, in which the person concerned lives as a

private individual, centred on home life with family and friends,
and engages in individual practices such as reading for pleasure,
keeping a personal diary, pursuing a special interest or hobby,

etc.;
the public domain, in which the person concerned acts as a
member of the general public, or of some organization, and is

engaged in transactions of various kinds for a variety of purposes;

the occupational domain, in which the person concerned is

engaged in his or her job or profession;

the educational domain, in which the person concerned is engaged
in organized learning, especially within an educational institution.

Acts of communication with one or more interlocutors are generally

undertaken by a language user in pursuance of his or her needs in a
given situation. In the personal domain, the intention may be to
entertain a visitor by exchanging information on families, friends, likes
and dislikes, to compare experiences and attitudes, etc.

Over the years, needs analyses and language audits have produced an
extensive literature on the language-using tasks a learner may be
equipped or required to tackle in order to deal with the exigencies of the
situations which arise in the various domains. The use of language for
playful purposes often plays an important part in language learning and
development, but is not confined to the educational domain.
In written production activities the language user as writer produces a
written text which is received by a readership of one or more readers.
In listening activities the language user as listener receives and
processes a spoken input produced by one or more speakers. Listening
activities include:
listening to public announcements
listening to media for example radio, TV, recordings, cinema
listening as a member of a live audience
listening to overheard conversations

In visual reception (reading) activities the user as reader receives and

processes as input written texts produced by one or more writers.
In interactive activities the language user acts alternately as speaker
and listener with one or more interlocutors so as to construct conjointly,
through the negotiation of meaning following the co-operative principle,
conversational discourse.
Interaction encompasses both receptive and productive activity as well
as activity unique to the construction of joint discourse and therefore all
reception strategies and all production strategies mentioned above are
also involved in interaction. However, the fact that spoken interaction

entails the collective creation of meaning by the establishment of some

degree of common mental context, defining what can be taken as given,
working out where people are coming from, converging towards each
other or defining and maintaining a comfortable distance, usually in real
time, means that in addition to receptive and productive strategies there
is a class of strategies exclusive to interaction concerned with the
management of this process.
In mediating activities, the language user is not concerned to express
his/her own meanings, but simply to act as an intermediary between
interlocutors who are unable to understand each other directly normally
speakers of different languages.
The Tuning Latin America Project arises in a context of intense reflection
on higher education, both on a regional and a national level. Up until
now, Tuning has been a project exclusively for Europe, involving more
than 135 European universities, which since 2001 have taken part in a
huge amount of work so as to create the European Higher Education
Area. During the IVth follow-up meeting of the European Higher
Education Area for the European Union, Latin America, and the Carribean
in Cordoba in Spain in October 2002, the representatives of Latin
America who took part, after listening to a presentation of the results of
the first phase of Tuning, suggested the possibility of developing a
similar project in Latin America. From this moment, the project began to
be prepared, and was presented to the European Commission by a group
of European and Latin American at the end of October 2003. It can be
said that the Tuning proposal for Latin America is an inter-continental
idea, a project that has been nurtured by both European and Latin
American academic contributions. The search for consensus is intercontinental too, and unique and universal; the things that change are
the people involved and the special situations that arise as a result of
each new challenge.

This paper takes a look at tuning as a methodology for educational

reform and its implications for educational development. The discussion
is set out within the context of the Tuning Pilot Project.
The tuning experience was exclusively European and came as a
response to the challenge set out in the Bologna Declaration of 1999,
involving 175 universities. Since 2004 the Tuning Project gradually
spread to other areas, including Latin
America, North America, Russia, Australia, Africa and China. Tuning as a
process is about seeking points of agreement, convergence and mutual
understanding in order to facilitate an understanding of educational
structures.
Another valuable observation from Kehm (2010) is a division of the
notion of quality in higher education into research quality constructed
through reputation and output indicators on the one hand and access
combined with attention to quality in teaching and learning on the
other. She further posits that academics are likely to claim that quality
issues should remain in their hands, while the increasing consensus of
quality-assurance agencies at the European level is that quality should
be defined according to criteria of usefulness and relevance. The
challenge to move the discourse of quality in higher education forward is
not only about where ownership lies, it is also about recognising how
distributed the ownership should be, hence the notion of an eco-system.