Recently at a potluck here in the Lake Chapala area of Mexico where I live, I had the chance to chat with an American woman who taught Spanish in the US for many years and was married to a man whose native tongue was Spanish. Naturally, I asked her some questions about how to learn Spanish.The conversation went to the topic of being fluent in Spanish. She explained that fluency means a very high level of skill and ease in a language. I have been using the word much more loosely, so that was interesting.
“Proficiency is really the more useful word,” she commented, “and most people are actually less proficient than they think they are.”
She referred me to the website for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, a US organization for improving and expanding language education at all levels. I found the page where they list their proficiency guidelines – these are for any language, not just Spanish. I found these quite interesting. They divide proficiency into four skills:
- Listening
- Speaking
- Reading
- Writing
Within each of these skills, they describe skills for novice, intermediate, advanced, superior, and distinguished levels of language proficiency.
I looked at the novice speaking category. It was divided further into low, mid, and high level novices. All novice speakers are in an extremely basic situation, where they can barely compose sentences and it’s hard to understand them. In my opinion, just off the cuff, I think someone who diligently worked through any of the programs I write about and had some practice with an actual Spanish speaker would advance beyond novice.
Intermediate level speakers can “initiate, minimally sustain, and close in a simple way basic communicative tasks.” For beginners, I think this is a worthy goal, like before a vacation trip.
I recognized myself in their Advanced description:
Can handle with confidence but not with facility complicated tasks and social situations, such as elaborating, complaining, and apologizing. Can narrate and describe with some details, linking sentences together smoothly. Can communicate facts and talk casually about topics of current public and personal interest, using general vocabulary. Shortcomings can often be smoothed over by communicative strategies, such as pause fillers, stalling devices, and different rates of speech. Circumlocution which arises from vocabulary or syntactic limitations very often is quite successful, though some groping for words may still be evident.
I can elaborate, complain, and apologize with the best of them! I definitely grope for words, and I doubt I ever manage a long paragraph without a sprinkling of grammatical errors, so I wouldn’t have called myself advanced. I know I wouldn’t do nearly as well on writing Spanish, so I won’t check that one out today! I’ll just bask in being an advanced speaker.
If you speak some Spanish, or any foreign language, this is an interesting way to evaluate where you stand.
