Guidelines for setting proficiency goals

What do you mean when you say you want to learn a new language? What do you want to be able to do in the language? Maybe you just want to be able to buy things in a shop or ask directions. Maybe you want to feel comfortable living in a country and making friends. Or will you need to use the language to communicate subtle distinctions in your work as well as in your everyday life?

The answers to these questions will help determine your language learning goals. The more specific you can be about your goals, the better you will know whether or not you have met them.

To help you decide on your goals, there are discussions of the levels of proficiency in each language skill (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). These guidelines use a five-level proficiency scale to represent the major divisions of the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages Guidelines, the ACTFL Guidelines and the corresponding levels of the Interagency Language Roundtable scale (Foreign Services Institute), the ILR (FSI) scale. To set goals, the five major divisions give a sufficient fine-grain scale. For evaluation, the subdivisions of each level are helpful.

• Guidelines for setting listening goals
• Guidelines for setting speaking goals
• Guidelines for setting reading goals
• Guidelines for setting writing goals

• Overview module: Guidelines for setting proficiency goals
• In modular book: Managing Your Language Learning Program, by Carol J. Orwig
• In bookshelf: Language Learning

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 3.5, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 2 September 1998

© 1999 SIL International