Teachers College, Columbia University, Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, 2007, Vol. 7, No. 2 The Forum Wording the ACTFL Guidelines: Some Issues to Consider Adrienne Wai Man Lew Teachers College, Columbia University The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines (1985) offer a quick but consistent yardstick for large-scale scoring of global language performance. From the ACTFL revised Speaking Guidelines (1999), descriptors such as being able to “distinguish main ideas from supporting information through syntactic, lexical, and suprasegmental features” (p. 3) for the Superior Speaker, “command morphology and the most frequently used syntactic structures” (Breiner-Sanders, Swender, & Terry, 2001, p. 3) for the Advanced Writer, and “understand cognates” (p. 3) for the Novice-low Listener allow for some holistic, potentially quantifiable rubrics to come into place for assessing and classifying language performance in the four skills. With that said, not all of the descriptors are objectively stipulated. Some, such as being able to “understand a writer's use of nuance and subtlety” (ACTFL, 1985, p. 18) for the Distinguished Reader, “be understood by sympathetic interlocutors” (ACTFL, 1999, p. 5) for the Intermediate- Low Speaker, and “be strongly sensitive to social and cultural references and aesthetic norms” (ACTFL, 1985, p. 7) for the Distinguished Listener could be highly subject to each individual assessor's interpretation. Apparently, constructs like “use of nuance and subtlety” (ACTFL, 1985, p. 18), “sympathetic interlocutors” (ACTFL, 1999, p. 5), and “aesthetic norms” (Breiner-Sanders et al., 2001, p. 1) need to be further delineated and agreed upon, with support from empirical research regarding how they should be operationalized and adequately established by any group of practitioners who wish to adopt such guidelines for their particular use. Another point to note is: Given the ultimate attainment of the majority of foreign language learners, descriptions of proficiency levels are, presumably, ranges of essential abilities representative of the growth in functional language competency, instead of the whole spectrum of native-like linguistic activities in reality (ACTFL, 1999). The details as to what a learner is able and/or unable to do at each level and its sublevels (e.g., Intermediate-High) are presented in a bottom-up manner in the guidelines. As such, a thorough picture of what a top-level learner should be able to master is not available until the very end of each competency section, while the descriptions are bound to get more redundant as the proficiency levels progress. The use of negative, demotivating denotations (e.g., having “essentially no ability to comprehend even short utterances” [ACTFL, 1985, p. 3] for the Novice-Low listener), in particular, becomes an unfortunate inevitability. One way for practitioners to get around this is to draw insights from the ACTFL's revised guidelines for speaking (ACTFL, 1999), as well as those for writing (Breiner-Sanders et al., 2001). Instead of merely focusing on the performance in the functions of a particular level, these two documents employ an advanced to novice approach to description (i.e., going from Superior down to Novice-Low), stressing what the learner can do with the language rather than what he or she 1