The Forum The ACTFL Guidelines:

Ellis and Larsen-Freeman (2006) state that indices of language fluency and proficiency would be extremely valuable for researchers. Guidelines that provide benchmarks for development are useful for both inter-learner and intra-learner comparability. The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines may be useful for their descriptive power and arguably realistic assumptions of language development. However, the nature of the guidelines ’ construct paradoxically limits its usefulness. The following commentary will describe my perspective of the ACTFL’s view of language development and explain why the putative truths about language development and language use limit the utility of the scales. A commendable but problematic feature of the guidelines is the shifting granularity of observation from Novice to Distinguished proficiency levels. At the lowest end of the learner spectrum, attention is given to discrete phonological, morphological, and lexical features. The attention shifts through progressively macroscopic observations at the sentence and discourse levels, to stylistic features of language. The development of topical knowledge, from concrete to abstract, is also implied in these observations. The guidelines ’ assumption that learners ' proficiency is to be measured by shifting criteria as it develops, balancing observations of accuracy an