Students - Handbook

ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines

The 1986 proficiency guidelines represent a hierarchy of global characterizations of integrated performance in speaking, listening, reading and writing. Each description is a representative, not an exhaustive, sample of a particular range of ability, and each level subsumes al previous levels, moving from simple to complex in an "all-before-and-more" fashion.

Because these guidelines identify stages of proficiency, as opposed to achievement, they are not intended to measure what an individual has achieved through specific classroom instruction but rather to allow assessment of what an individual can and cannot do, regardless of where, when, or how the language has been learned or acquired; thus words "learned" are used in the broadest sense. These guidelines are not based on a particular linguistic theory or pedagogical method, since the guidelines are proficiency-based, as opposed to achievement-based, and are intended to be used for global assessment.

The 1986 guidelines should not be considered the definitive version, since the construction and utilization of language proficiency guidelines is a dynamic, interactive process. The academic sector, like the government sector, will continue to refine and update the criteria periodically to reflect the needs of the users and the advances of the profession. In this vein, ACTFL owes a continuing debt to the creators of the 1982 provisional proficiency guidelines and, of course, to the members of the Interagency Language Roundtable Testing Committee, the creators of the government's Language Skill Level Descriptions.

ACTFL would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions on this current guidelines project:

Heidi Byrnes
James Child
Nina Levinson
Pardee Lowe, Jr.
Seiichi Makino
Irene Thompson
A. Ronald Walton

These proficiency guidelines are the product of grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

Note:

 

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines , developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, are an academic analog to the government language proficiency level descriptions, originally developed by the Foreign Service Institute and currently revised and used by the various language schools participating in the Interagency Language Roundtable (IRL). The government level descriptions differ from the ACTFL Guidelines in that a number system is used to designate eleven levels of proficiency, ranging from 0 to 5 (0, 0+, 1, 1+, 2, 2+, 3, 3+, 4, 4+, and 5), whereas the ACTFL Guidelines use the terms Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior to designate proficiency levels. In addition, the categories of Novice and Intermediate are further subdivided into three categories: Low, Mid, and High; the Advanced level is subdivided into Advanced and Advanced Plus (corresponding to 2 and 2+ on the government scale); the Superior level comprises the government levels 3, 3+, 4, 4+ and 5. Further discussion of the correspondence between the government and academic scales can be found in Chapter 1 ( Teaching Language in Context , 2nd ed., Alice Omaggio Hadley, Heinle and Heinle, 1993).