In l952, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a memo to the Dean of the Language School of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), calling for the creation of criteria that could be used to identify the foreign language proficiency of U.S. Government Employees. According to the memo, the criteria should be able to differentiate testable levels between "no knowledge" of the foreign language and "total mastery."
A committee, consisting of representatives of government agencies concerned with foreign languages, was established by the Civil Service Commission to develop definitions for each of these testable levels of proficiency and to create an inventory of employees with foreign language proficiency in the various agencies. The result of this effort was a scale, numbered 0-5, with a brief definition of the proficiency associated with each point. These l952 definitions were field tested and substantially revised in l956. That same year, the FSI established a policy of rating the language proficiency of all foreign service officers according to these definitions. Although they have subsequently undergone a number of revisions, the definitions of the different levels of speaking proficiency, which consist of one- or two-paragraph descriptions, have remained essentially the same.
This system of categorizing language proficiency was then adopted by all U.S. Government agencies, from the Peace Corps to the Defense Department (Sollenberger, 1978; Wilds, l975). Today the government scale is known as the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable (FILR) Skill Level Definitions and is available in Higgs (l984) and Duran et al. (l985).
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A committee, consisting of representatives of government agencies concerned with foreign languages, was established by the Civil Service Commission to develop definitions for each of these testable levels of proficiency and to create an inventory of employees with foreign language proficiency in the various agencies. The result of this effort was a scale, numbered 0-5, with a brief definition of the proficiency associated with each point. These l952 definitions were field tested and substantially revised in l956. That same year, the FSI established a policy of rating the language proficiency of all foreign service officers according to these definitions. Although they have subsequently undergone a number of revisions, the definitions of the different levels of speaking proficiency, which consist of one- or two-paragraph descriptions, have remained essentially the same.
This system of categorizing language proficiency was then adopted by all U.S. Government agencies, from the Peace Corps to the Defense Department (Sollenberger, 1978; Wilds, l975). Today the government scale is known as the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable (FILR) Skill Level Definitions and is available in Higgs (l984) and Duran et al. (l985).
