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ACTFL Proficiency Levels
ACTFL Proficiency Levels
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) is the national organization for language teachers in the US, and provides the standards and benchmarks for student achievement in language classes.
ACTFL has defined a set of "proficiency guidelines" that describe what students are capable of accomplishing with the language. Can you "create" with the language, or do you only know how to use the most common words and phrases? Can you narrate a story in multiple tenses? It is our goal to give students as high a level of proficiency as possible when they finish with our program, so that they can go out into the world and continue learning and using their language skills.
As we can see from this cone graphic, the skills of each level build upon one another. But just like when you fill a cone, we must keep in mind that as the cone widens, we need more skills to fill out the cone and reach the next level. It is easy to fill up the cone and move from Novice Low to Novice Mid, for example, but the movement from Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High represents a lot more skills, contexts, and text types that the student needs to "fill in" and master before moving up. Language acquisition is a question of time - and is so, so worth the payoff!
At Bothell High School German, we will aim for certain proficiency levels at the end of each year-long course. This will keep us motivated to push our skills further and further each year, and give us a great base from which we can keep growing, even beyond our time together at BHS. The expectations for the end of each course are as follows:
German 100: Novice Mid (communicating in words and phrases)
German 200: Novice High (communicating in simple sentences)
German 350: Intermediate Low (communicating in strings of sentences)
AP German: Intermediate Mid (communicating in strings of connected sentences)
What does this mean? This means that students leaving the program will be able to understand and interact in discourse at the "connected sentence" level - precisely what is needed to pass the CIHS German and earn the Seal of Biliteracy on your diploma. Intermediate-level proficiency is also called "survival" proficiency, which means that someone with Intermediate proficiency could live in a country that speaks the language, survive, and continue learning more to quickly gain Advanced proficiency. (And you need at least Advanced Low proficiency to be a teacher of a language!)
Students are likely to exceed these proficiency targets during their time at Bothell, as we will focus on spending 90%+ of class time in the target language and exposing students to as much natural, high frequency German as possible. But it is helpful to know the steps that students will take along the way to proficiency in German, as shown below:
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