ACTFL Proficiency Meets EdTech: Estimating Language Levels with AI Tools

What Are ACTFL Proficiency Levels?

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines are a set of nationally recognized standards created by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). These levels define what students can do with a language in real-life contexts. The framework helps educators and school leaders measure student progress consistently across grades, schools, and even districts.

The proficiency levels are divided into five major categories:

• Novice (Low, Mid, High)
• Intermediate (Low, Mid, High)
• Advanced (Low, Mid, High)
• Superior
• Distinguished

Each level is defined separately for speaking, writing, listening, and reading, acknowledging that learners may have different proficiencies across each modality.

ACTFL Levels Explained in Detail

Novice Level

• Novice Low: Can produce isolated words and memorized phrases. Communication is extremely limited.
• Novice Mid: Can handle short, formulaic conversations on familiar topics using learned phrases.
• Novice High: Can manage simple interactions with some success but often requires repetition, rephrasing, or support.

Intermediate Level

• Intermediate Low: Can create simple sentences, ask and answer questions, and handle basic transactions in familiar contexts.
• Intermediate Mid: Can maintain simple conversations on familiar topics with greater control and clarity.
• Intermediate High: Can narrate and describe in past, present, and future time frames in familiar settings. Errors may occur, especially when complexity increases.

Advanced Level

• Advanced Low: Can narrate and describe across time frames and handle unexpected complications with consistent control.
• Advanced Mid: Can engage in extended discourse on a variety of concrete topics, support opinions, and communicate with clarity.
• Advanced High: Can handle most communicative tasks with linguistic precision and fluency, but may still struggle with fully abstract or unfamiliar content. Unlike native speakers, they may lack consistency across highly complex or nuanced situations.

Superior

Able to support opinions, hypothesize, and handle extended discourse across unfamiliar topics with ease and accuracy. Superior speakers demonstrate a high degree of fluency and grammatical control across formal, abstract, and professional contexts.

Distinguished

Can speak and write with the sophistication, nuance, and rhetorical style of a highly educated native speaker. This level is rare and often found in individuals functioning in diplomatic, academic, or leadership roles that demand native-like precision.

How Are ACTFL Proficiency Levels Estimated?

Historically, these levels were assessed through:

• Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI) by certified ACTFL raters
• Writing Proficiency Tests (WPT) and other standardized writing assessments
• Portfolios with curated samples of student work

While highly reliable, these methods are time-intensive, require trained raters, and are often cost-prohibitive for frequent classroom use.

Modern Estimation Tools

Today, many schools use AI-powered tools that estimate proficiency based on student responses. These tools analyze:

• Vocabulary sophistication
• Sentence structure
• Grammatical accuracy
• Fluency and pronunciation (for speaking tasks)

It is important to note that these tools offer unofficial proficiency estimates—they are not substitutes for certified ACTFL assessments. However, they provide a scalable way to monitor growth and inform instruction.

Platforms like Speakable provide real-time estimates of ACTFL levels by evaluating open-ended responses. While not ACTFL-certified, such tools give teachers valuable data and feedback without requiring formal interviews.

Why ACTFL Proficiency Matters for Schools

For Teachers:

• Helps plan instruction that targets real-world communication skills
• Aligns classroom practice with national standards
• Provides consistent criteria to monitor individual student progress

For School Leaders:

• Enables program-wide reporting on student growth
• Identifies instructional gaps and strengths across classrooms
• Supports curriculum alignment, pacing, and intervention decisions

When tracked consistently across modalities, ACTFL levels create a shared framework for connecting classroom instruction to long-term learning goals.

How to Integrate ACTFL Proficiency Levels in Your Program

1. Align Assignments with Proficiency Goals

Design speaking and writing tasks that reflect the "can-do" statements at each level. For example:

• Novice Mid: "Introduce yourself and say what you like to eat."
• Intermediate High: "Describe a problem you had while traveling and how you solved it."

2. Use Rubrics That Match the ACTFL Framework

ACTFL provides separate rubrics for speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Use these to evaluate student work and guide feedback.

3. Collect Student Evidence Over Time

Track student recordings and writing samples across the year. Portfolios allow for a longitudinal view of progress, especially when aligned to the same proficiency descriptors.

4. Leverage Technology for Efficiency

Platforms like Speakable provide AI-supported grading aligned to ACTFL descriptors, allowing teachers to:

• Assign speaking and writing tasks frequently
• Get immediate, rubric-based feedback
• Monitor growth across classrooms or grade levels

ACTFL Proficiency vs. Performance

It’s important to distinguish between proficiency and performance:

• Performance measures what students can do in rehearsed or familiar contexts, often within the scope of a unit or theme.
• Proficiency reflects what students can do spontaneously in unrehearsed situations and unfamiliar contexts.

To help students move from performance to proficiency:

• Incorporate unpredictable, open-ended tasks
• Use authentic resources and spontaneous prompts
• Encourage real-world communication beyond drills and rehearsals

Related Frameworks and How ACTFL Compares

ACTFL vs. CEFR

• CEFR (A1 to C2) is Europe’s proficiency framework.
• ACTFL uses a different naming structure but both assess similar language functions.

ACTFL vs. WIDA (for English Learners)

• WIDA is used for assessing English language development in multilingual learners.
• While ACTFL focuses on world language instruction, some overlaps exist in the speaking and writing domains.

Schools working with multilingual learners may choose to align assessments with ACTFL, WIDA, or both depending on student needs and program goals.

Example Task Types by ACTFL Level

Conclusion: Bringing Proficiency-Based Instruction to Life

The ACTFL proficiency levels offer more than a reporting framework. They provide a shared language for:

• Describing student ability
• Planning instruction
• Designing assessments
• Tracking long-term growth

Thanks to advances in AI and speech technology, schools can now estimate proficiency in real-time and embed it directly into daily instruction—while reserving formal ACTFL assessments for high-stakes measurement.

If you’re a world language teacher or program coordinator looking to strengthen your program with a national benchmark, adopting ACTFL-aligned tools and tasks is a powerful next step.