View Content #27640

Linda Forrest, CASLS Research Director

Last week, we discussed what language proficiency is. And whatever it is, every instructor knows that some students seem to have more or less of it when compared to other students. Instructors and students alike often describe these abilities with words such as ‘beginning’ or ‘advanced,’ but there is no way to know whether one person’s ‘advanced’ means the same thing as the next person’s. At the same time, test developers need to provide test users with meaningful interpretations of the scores their tests produce. The answer to these issues is for all parties to describe proficiency using a well-defined scale.

A scale is a set of descriptions of abilities to communicate in a language. No universal scale for language proficiency exists, so each test developer is faced with the task of developing their own scale. Other groups have developed additional scales. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) developed a scale widely used by U.S. language professionals. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the European Union developed the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as an international standard for describing language ability. The Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) has its own standard grading scale for rating U.S. Federal-level employees.

The plethora of proficiency scales can be confusing at first, but a good understanding of at least one scale is important for language educators. Each scale describes a continuum of langauge abilities from no language ability at all to the most superior ability into a number of distinguishable levels. For each level, a descriptor is developed which explains the types of communicative tasks a learner would handle successfully if they had that level of ability. Descriptors may mention a variety of factors, such as subject areas a learner can handle, the type of language they can produce (isolated words, sentence strings, paragraphs, etc.), the breadth of their vocabulary, their ability to use grammatical features such as tense, how well they can be understood by interlocutors, as well as areas that may give them difficulty.

Although no descriptor on any scale will perfectly describe the language abilities are any particular individual, there is almost always a category that provides a ‘reasonably accurate’ portrayal. By carefully considering the descriptors, learners are able to see the overall picture of their progress through the waypoints along the road of language proficiency.

Here are three language proficiency scales to investigate:

ALTA: https://www.altalang.com/language-testing/alta-scale/

ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-proficiency-guidelines-2012

ILR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale