ACTFL guidelines: Speaking--Superior

The Superior level is characterized by the speaker's ability to:

• participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, professional, and abstract topics
• support opinions and hypothesize using native-like discourse strategies.

Able to speak the language with sufficient accuracy to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, professional, and abstract topics. Can discuss special fields of competence and interest with ease. Can support opinions and hypothesize, but may not be able to tailor language to audience or discuss in depth highly abstract or unfamiliar topics. Usually the Superior level speaker is only partially familiar with regional or other dialectical variants. The Superior level speaker commands a wide variety of interactive strategies and shows good awareness of discourse strategies. The latter involves the ability to distinguish main ideas from supporting information through syntactic, lexical, and suprasegmental features (pitch, stress, intonation). Sporadic errors may occur, particularly in low-frequency structures and some complex high-frequency structures more common to formal writing, but no patterns of error are evident. Errors do not disturb the native speaker or interfere with communication.

• Reaching superior speaking proficiency
• Reaching distinguished speaking proficiency

• Generic module: ACTFL guidelines: Speaking--Superior
• In overview module: ACTFL guidelines: Speaking
• In modular book: ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, by American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages
• In document collection: Other Resources
• 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: 5 August 1998

© 1999 SIL International