EAQUALS Teacher Development Framework
The EAQUALS Teacher Development Framework — formally the Eaquals Framework for Language Teacher Training and Development — is a competence-descriptor framework for language teachers, published by EAQUALS, an international non-profit association for quality assurance in language education. It maps key professional knowledge and skills across phases of teacher development and is used by language schools and ministries to structure teacher appraisal, training, and career planning.
EAQUALS as the publishing body
EAQUALS — Evaluation and Accreditation of Quality Language Services — was founded in 1991 and accredits language schools internationally against published standards. Its teacher-development outputs run alongside its accreditation work, on the argument that consistent teacher quality requires shared descriptors of what competent teaching looks like at different career stages.
Three phases of development
The framework organises descriptors across three main phases.
Phase 1 applies early in a teaching career, before substantial experience has been accumulated, when the teacher's professional repertoire is not yet fully developed.
Phase 2 is an intermediate phase in which teachers accumulate experience, gain greater professional autonomy, and broaden the range of contexts and learner types they can handle competently.
Phase 3 describes teachers with broad experience, further training, sustained commitment to the profession, and high levels of competence across a wide range of teaching situations.
The phases are not tied to fixed years of experience; they describe profiles of competence that teachers move through at different rates.
Five competence areas
Within each phase the framework specifies descriptors across five competence areas: Planning teaching and learning, Teaching and supporting learning, Assessment of learning, Language, communication and culture, and The teacher as professional. Each area carries multiple descriptors covering knowledge and skills, written in observable, evidence-able language so that they can support both self-assessment and external review.
Relation to the European Profiling Grid
The EAQUALS Framework is conceptually adjacent to the European Profiling Grid (EPG), a separate but related EU-funded grid for language teacher competence developed in 2013 with EAQUALS involvement. The EPG uses a finer-grained six-phase structure and has been widely used in self-assessment software; the EAQUALS Framework is the more concise descriptor set used inside EAQUALS-accredited institutions.
Use in practice
Schools use the framework to structure observation criteria, appraisal conversations, and individual development plans. Ministries and large language-school chains have used it to align in-house training programmes to recognised competence stages. Individual teachers use it as a self-assessment tool, identifying the descriptors that match their current practice and those that mark the next phase of development.
References
- EAQUALS. The Eaquals Framework for Language Teacher Training and Development. eaquals.org/our-expertise/teacher-development
- EAQUALS. Eaquals-Framework-for-Language-Teacher-Training-and-Development-Online.pdf. eaquals.org