Friday, October 7, 2011

Levels of English Language Proficiency

TESOL has developed five levels of English language proficiency. The goal of the five levels is to allow teachers to see student development and progress. The levels reflect different characteristics of language development. Understanding these levels is important in using the TESOL standards appropriately because you can use level-appropriate activities to enhance student learning.
Level 1- Starting
ELLs can understand and use...
language to communicate with others around basic concrete needs
high frequency words and memorized chunks of language
words, phrases, or chunks of language
pictorial, graphic, or nonverbal representation of language

Level 2-Emerging
ELLs can understand and use...
language to draw on simple and routine experiences to communicate with others.
high frequency and some general academic vocabulary and expressions.
phrases or short sentences in oral or written communication.
oral or written language, making errors that often impede the meaning of the conversation.

Level 3-Developing
ELLs can understand and use...
language to communicate with others on familiar matters regularly encountered.
general and some specialized academic vocabulary and expressions.
expanded sentences in oral or written communication.
oral or written language, making errors that may impede the communication but retain much of its meaning.

Level 4-Expanding
ELLs can understand and use...
language in both concrete and abstract situations and apply language to new experiences
specialized and some technical academic vocabulary and expressions.
a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity in oral and written communication.
oral or written language, making minimal errors that do not impede the overall meaning of the communication

Level 5-Bridging
ELLs can understand and use...
a wide range of longer oral and written texts and recognize implicit meaning.
technical academic vocabulary and expressions.
a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity in extended oral or written discourse.
oral or written language approaching comparability to that of English-proficient peers.

No comments:

Post a Comment