At the outset of any reform, the usual requirement is to align existing course syllabi to the new curriculum. The process of alignment could be emotionally charged and mentally straining, as language teachers find it extremely difficult to give up a good course syllabus and useful course contents that were developed over the years. To tackle this problem, we adopted a different, rather counterintuitive, approach to aligning existing syllabi to a reform. Instead of starting the reform process by foregrounding the CEFR framework and looking into how our course syllabi can be aligned to it, we decided to simultaneously foreground both our course syllabi and the framework. Once we adopted this approach, the emotional and mental barriers of the teaching staff seemed to wear away, as we were able to see how much we were already doing and what was left for us to be done to fully align with the reform.
In the presentation, I will focus on the Advanced B syllabus. I will show the steps that we took to make the alignment possible. I will also show which can-dos were fully adopted, which were adapted, which were postponed to a later stage, and which were left altogether as unbefitting our student population. Finally, I will present some of the feedback of the teachers teaching this level on the alignment process.