The aim of the project known as EBAFLS (Building a European bank of anchor items for foreign language skills) is to facilitate the assessment of foreign language skills. The item bank is designed to be used throughout Europe and will provide a way to link national assessment instruments to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Thanks to EBAFLS, language assessment will be transparent and reliable and foreign language certificates or diplomas should be mutually comparable across Europe. The project is specifically aimed at testing students at the end of compulsory education. All eight participating countries have provided input for the item bank, which covers reading and listening comprehension in three foreign languages (English, French and German). As all the items in the bank have already been used in tests in one of the participating countries and are culturally neutral, it will be possible to measure the same skills in all European countries.