ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines were created by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in order to provide a means of assessing the proficiency of a foreign language speaker.

The guidelines are broken up into different proficiency levels: novice, intermediate, advanced, superior, and distinguished. Additionally, each of these (except superior and distinguished) is further subdivided into low, mid and high. These proficiency levels are defined separately for ability to listen, speak, read and write. Thus, in those American programs that emphasize written language over spoken, students may reach the advanced level in reading and writing while remaining at a lower level in listening and speaking.

These guidelines can be helpful to find the proficiency levels of people in different languages. There are resources for different languages. For Arabic, Chinese, French, English, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, you can find all those guidelines levels for the speaking, writing, listening and reading abilities. For Portuguese you will find guidelines only for the speaking ability. There are also guidelines for Azerbaijani, Indonesian and Korean.