I am in the midst of being assessed for an international business opportunity, during which I’ve been asked to submit to rigorous but objective assessments of my foreign language skills. It’s not often that professionals get to gauge perception vs. reality regarding claims of proficiency or fluency in any skill set, so I welcomed this chance to put my dinero where my boca is. Here are a couple options for you to find out how fluent you really are:
Self-Assessment: the Interagency Language Roundtable publishes a concise set of self-administered tests. Click through to learn your ranked score in reading, listening, and speaking your chosen foreign language. I like the progressive, ladder-like approach… when you can’t answer Yes anymore, you’ve reached your rank number.
Live-and-In-Person Assessment: For a modest fee and by prior appointment, agencies such as Diplomatic Language Services provide exceptional proficiency-based foreign language testing, in person (or via phone and web). Professional and experienced native-speaking proctors and assessors conduct a battery of skills assessments and provide results almost immediately to you plus whomever else needs to know. The session is challenging, but yields a realistic assessment of how you’ll fare speaking non-English, in real-life work and social settings.
Rigorous but objective exams are challenging to undergo, whether for professional skills certification or for testing your language know-how. But a measured assessment from the pros, one that you can share with confidence and pride, gives you an edge in your global business bag of tricks.
I’d really like to take some of the self assessments but only see pdfs on the links you provided. Do you have an exact link to the assessments? Particularly the ones for francais?
Hi Stephen – I suggest you track back to the ILR website and see if they have more interactive, Web-based options besides these non-interactive PDFs. They were the ones provided to me by the assessors. Bon chance!