What is proficiency?

Proficiency is a description of what a person can do with language in terms of speaking, writing, listening, and reading in real-world situations in a spontaneous and non-rehearsed context. For each of these 4 skills, individuals will be classified as novice, intermediate or advanced. Because proficiency falls on a continuum, a proficiency test has no passing score. Rather, results indicate the level of language complexity that an individual has in the target language.