9 years ago
4
Language Levels (Greg's Reflections)
An explanation of the different terms for describing someone's ability to use a language (L2, B1, heritage speaker...)
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http://gregreflects.blogspot.ca
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Do you agree with all the descriptions of each level?
Well, they're pretty standard, there's not much to agree or disagree with. It's the standard that has been created to assert one's language ability in Europe, where many people need to identify levels in many different languages precisely for jobs, university, etc. It's pretty recent (1996), but it took 7 years to perfect. I believe we can trust it. ;-)
Some parts of the descriptions were a little different from what I've seen elsewhere. An example would be being fluent at B2, but not being able to watch a movie in the other language without difficulty at C1.
Well, the definition of fluency varies a lot from people to people, including linguists. But the strict definition of the term is "when language flows", it says nothing about grammatical mistakes. As long as the speaker isn't hesitant and is understood by natives, s/he's considered fluent by this definition.
See this wikipedia article about language proficiency.