Language proficiency: from description to prescription and back?

Abstract Language proficiency, when expressed as a grade or a mark, is often associated with the notions of measurement accuracy, reliability and trustworthiness. In this article my focus is on English as an additional/second language proficiency in the past fifty years or so. I will suggest that the notion of proficiency is an artefact influenced by the ebbs and flows of intellectual movements and conceptual recontextualizations. The onset of the concept of communicative competence in the 1970s serves as the point of departure for this discussion. I will explore the ways in which this primarily research-oriented concept has been filtered through a particular set of disciplinary and ideological perspectives that led to a pared-down view of language communication and a universalist approach to curriculum development and assessment of proficiency. After that I will turn to the recent research findings and theorizations in fields such as academic literacies, English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism and translanguaging to show the need for a more empirically situated, dynamic and fluid approach to language use and language proficiency. Further exploratory work is needed at this watershed moment. I will illustrate some of the challenges by analysing some of the conceptual and technical difficulties found in an international language curriculum and assessment framework as it attempts to embody a more dynamic and situated approach. In the final part of the discussion I will suggest a set of basic questions for further reflexive analysis and research.