EALTA is a professional association of institutions carrying out language assessment in Europe. It was founded under the financial support of the European Committee. The main goal of EALTA is to help understand the theoretical principles of language assessment throughout the Europe, to improve the assessment tools and to ensure the exchange of experience. EALTA organizes preliminary conferences, regional workshops, online courses, and offers the consulting services to non-governmental, governmental and international organizations on the assessment policy and implementation thereof, the development and validity of assessment tools, assessment results and recognition of results. EALTA brings together the leading assessment institutions such as TestDaF-Institut, ETS Global (Educational Testing Service), Oxford University Press, LanguageCert, British Council, CITO, CIEP, Pearson, Language Testing and the Scottish Qualifications Authority in a network as members.
SEC has been an institutional member of the EALTA since November 2019. The main areas of cooperation with EALTA include developing and improving SEC’s foreign language proficiency assessment tools in accordance with the CEFR levels, conducting joint research and mutual exchange of experience with leading organizations in this field, as well as joining projects, conferences and regional workshops organized by EALTA as a participant or partner.
In 2019, the CEC addressed a request to the Council of Europe, through its institutional partner EALTA, regarding the official translation of the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). In response to the SEC's request for the official translation of the document in 2020, the Council of Europe's Public Relations and Publications Department submitted a letter of support to the SEC for the official translation of the CEFR. The CEFR was first published as an official document in 2001 in English and French and has been translated into 40 languages; however, the document has not been officially translated into Azerbaijani. The SEC signed a cooperation agreement with the Azerbaijan State Translation Centre in March 2020 to implement the project to translate the CEFR document from English to Azerbaijani, and the translation of the document was completed in 2021. The translation of the latest edition of the CEFR into Azerbaijani supports the work being done in the country towards the learning, teaching and assessment of foreign languages.