*I Can Speaking Good!The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines Revisited

Prof. Thomas J. GarzaSlavic and Eurasian StudiesDirector, Texas Language CenterUniversity of Texas at Austin

Beginnings: Interagency Language Roundtable

• Imperative of WWII and Korean Wars• Civil Service Commission ordered to create

inventory of language abilities of employees• No measure of proficiency existed• 1955: Foreign Service Institute (FSI) charged

with development of descriptors

Development of ILR Scale

• Creation of six-point (0-5) scale• Functional descriptors for each level• Development of interview technique to

determine level (Oral Proficiency Interview)• Standardized scoring process• Later broken into language

skills (speaking, reading, etc.)• 1985 Revised to include plusses

Guidelines for the Academy:American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

• 1982: Provisional Guidelines released• 1986: First official four-skill guidelines released• 1999-2001: Revised guidelines released

ACTFL Pyramid of Proficiency

• Use of descriptors inplace of ILR numbers

• Levels themselves aredescriptive

• Correspond to ILR levels,including inter-level designations: low, mid, high for + and -

Cultural Literacy and Literary Texts

“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again it might not. [...] Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.”

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City, Vintage /Random House: NY, 1984, pp. 1-2.