Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

doi:10.1017/9781108333603.024

23 - Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

from Part V - Pedagogical Interventions and Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2019

David Little

Edited by

John W. Schwieter and

Alessandro Benati

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John W. Schwieter: Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Alessandro Benati: Affiliation:
American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

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Summary

In the decades following the Second World War, there was a strongly felt need on both sides of the Atlantic to find ways of describing L2 proficiency in terms of functional capacity—the ability to perform communicative tasks in the real world—rather than grammatical knowledge. In the wake of wars against Japan and Korea, the United States government wanted to be able to gauge what its employees could do in the L2s they had learnt; in Europe, a major challenge was to enable adult language learners to develop communicative repertoires sufficient to support mobility. This chapter focuses on the two most influential instruments to emerge from this reorientation of L2 education, the Proficiency guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL PG; ACTFL, 1986, 2012a; Breiner-Sanders et al., 2000; Breiner-Sanders, Swender, & Terry, 2002) and the Council of Europe’s Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR), originally published in the organization’s two official languages, English and French (Council of Europe, 2001a, 2001b).

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning , pp. 550 - 574

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108333603.024 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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