Evaluation of Communicative Competence: The ACTFL Provisional Proficiency Guidelines

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING PROFESSION, more than any other it seems to me, is in perpetual search for new slogans.' I recall the comment of a colleague back in 1971, when I was a newcomer to the profession and interested in exploring the concept of communicative competence.2 Communicative competence, he said to me, that'll be a good topic for a year or two. Then what are you going to do? My colleague did not foresee the exploration and discussion that would ensue. Today, more than a decade later, interest in the concept of communicative competence has not only not waned, it continues to grow and has led to the elaboration of descriptive models that have in turn provided frameworks for further research into the nature and acquisition of second-language proficiency.3 The pre-eminence of communicative competence as a focus of discussions of second-language teaching and evaluation was nowhere more apparent than at the October 1984 TOEFL Invitational Conference at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. The conference was held to consider revision