LEVEL 0 (No Proficiency)

No functional ability

Level 1 (Survival)

The candidate can understand and participate in very simple conversations about:

• personal welfare and survival on a day-to-day basis
• basic needs such as meals, lodging, transportation, simple directions
• simple daily life and routine travel arrangements
• requests for services such as ordering a simple meal, renting a hotel room, etc.

The candidate can understand and/or produce:

• simple questions and answers in face-to-face conversation in a standard dialect
• main ideas
• ordinary courtesy requirements
• can create with the language
• questions about daily life & routine travel
• short conversations

Candidate’s level of linguistic accuracy:

• requires repetition, rewording, slower than normal speech
• strong interference from native language
• makes errors in simple structures
• has limited vocabulary
• has poor pronunciation, but makes some distinction in stress and intonation
• intelligible to native speakers USED TO dealing with non-native speaker
• interlanguage may dominate
• Little precision in information understood

Level 2 (Limited Working Proficiency)

The candidate can understand and participate in routine conversations about:

• personal background and interests
• current events
• concrete topics
• family
• work
• travel

The candidate can understand and/or produce:

• facts (but not between or beyond the lines)
• casual conversations
• instructions and directions
• concrete descriptions of people, places, and things
• narration about past, current, and future activitiesv • a resolution for a familiar situation with a complication

Candidate’s level of linguistic accuracy:

• understands and is understandable to a native speaker NOT USED TO dealing with non-native speakers
• some repetition and rewording still necessary to understand and to be understood
• sometimes miscommunicates and is misunderstood
 

Level 3 (General Professional Proficiency)

The candidate can understand and participate in discussions about:

• social, economic, cultural, scientific, and global issues
• professional reports and meetings
• particular interests
• special fields of competence

The candidate can:

• infer
• detect emotional overtones
• describe & explain in detail
• hypothesize
• give and support opinion
• handle unfamiliar and abstract topics

Candidate’s level of linguistic accuracy:

• doesn’t understand native speaker who speaks very rapidly
• rarely requests paraphrasing/ explanations
• some low-frequency structures evident
• control of Complex structure
• native speaker rarely requires repetition or rephrasing to understand or to be understood
• Appears to be “thinking” in the language
 

Level 4 (Advanced Professional)

The candidate can understand and participate in:

• formal presentations within the range of his/her experience
• debates, conferences, broadcasts, press conferences
• meetings, seminars, task groups
• discussions about editorial and literary material

The candidate can:

• counsel
• persuade
• negotiate
• interpret informally for dignitaries
• represent both sides of an issue
• tailor language according to context and audience
• express opinions almost as well as in native language
• produce highly organized discourse, including extensive use of complex sentence structure and both high- and low-frequency abstract vocabulary
• understand all standard and some non-standard dialects including common slang / technical jargon
• understand the type of language heard in speeches when sprinkled with idioms and stylistic embellishments
• readily and accurately infer meanings and implications”
• understand all forms and styles of speech pertinent to professional needs
Candidate’s level of linguistic accuracy:
• doesn’t readily understand dialect variations and colloquialisms outside the range of experience
• may have trouble with extreme dialect, some slang, and speech marked by interference
• may have an accent but rarely mispronounces
• makes low-frequency errors that a native English speaker wouldn’t make
• target language culture dominates
• no patterns of pronunciation and communication errors