Language skills and proficiency levels
Language proficiency can be divided into 4 main skills and for each skill there can be several levels.
Skills
The 4 main skills are:
- listen
- speak
- read
- write
They can further divided into subcategories and they can get more details. Trying to answer two questions:
- How can we gain such proficiency?
- How can we verify our proficiency? (get feedback)
listen and understand (vocabulary)
- podcast
- radio stations
- videos (e.g. youtube, netflix)
- real-life person
How to verify?
In the case of a real person it will be evident from the flow of the conversation.
In the other cases having a written version of the same text can help you verify that you recognized the words. Having a translation to a language you know better can help verify your understanding.
speak (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation)
- For this you will need another person to talk to.
read and understand
- You need text and the translation.
- This can be done by yourself manually if you have access to the translation to a language you speak better.
- This can be partially automated as well. (DuoLingo, LibreLingo)
read aloud and pronounce correctly
- For this you need some text and another person to verify your pronunciation.
- There is no good way to automate this.
write (vocabulary, grammar)
- To some extent this can be practiced and verified with some software. (e.g. Duolingo, LibreLingo)
- for really high quality you will need a real person.
Levels of proficiency
There are at lest two system to define the level of proficiency.
CEFR - Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
ILR scale - Interagency Language Roundtable scale
On this page about ILR scale you can find details of levels separately for the various skills.