English language proficiencies – recasting disciplinary and pedagogic sensibilities

ABSTRACT

The notion of language proficiency in English Language Teaching (ELT), as an internationalized educational enterprise, has tended to be operationalized in terms of stable lexicogrammar and enduring normative patterns of social use. It will be argued that this ‘established’ stability has been challenged by the scholarship in several fields of applied language studies that has demonstrated the ‘leaky’ and mutable language boundaries and emergent communicative enactments in situated use. The main theme of this article is on the coalescing professional and curricular recognition of the fact that use of English is contextually and functionally variegated, and can include resources from other languages. I will draw on relevant works from research fields such as academic literacies, English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism, and translanguaging to illustrate this growing understanding. Some aspects of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) will be discussed as a curricular example of the movement towards a more linguistically fluid and interactionally accomplished notion of language proficiency. In the final part of the discussion I will look at the key challenges brought about by this more contingent and situated view of language proficiency/ies in terms of pedagogy and assessment, and some of the potentially productive directions of investigation for further development.

Introduction

The widespread use of English in the world, particularly with the advent of the techno-economic globalization in the second half of the 20^th century, has given rise to the impression that English is a stable and uniform means of communication with clearly definable lexicogrammatical and pragmatic features. The worldwide enterprise of English Language Teaching (ELT) has undoubtedly benefitted from the portrayal of this commodifiable simplicity of epistemic certainty and durability.¹ The conceptual moves and empirical investigations in the fields of English as an International language, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), translanguaging/flexible multilingualism, World Englishes in the past twenty years or so have, however, steadily eroded this putative thing-like quality attributed to the English language. These bodies of scholarship have instead pointed to the ‘leaky’ and mutable language boundaries and rules in use, and the fluidities of pragmatic conventions. In this discussion, I will explore two particular additional/second language education issues that have emerged as part of our complexifying understanding of what counts as English(es) in the world: The multifaceted curricular and pedagogic orientations toward English language teaching, and the conceptual shifts toward language proficiencies. In many ways, as a community of English language education practitioners and researchers, we are at an inflection point of paradigmatic extension.

The point of departure of this discussion is that the ELT profession collectively have taken notice of the critical arguments and empirical insights from recent and still developing scholarship in fields such as ELF and translanguaging. The established principles and practices of ELT at large, hailing from the late 1970s, are giving way to an emerging dispensation. In the first part of the article, I will give a brief account of the protean nature of the concept of proficiency. This will provide a conceptual frame for sampling the different perspectives and practices that English language educators in different parts of the world are developing as they engage with different ideas of language learning and language proficiency; these professional responses signpost the emerging directions of travel on the ground. This will be followed by a discussion on the extended notion of language proficiency in the revised Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR Companion Volume, Council of Europe, 2020). The revised CEFR represents a concrete example of paradigm extending by a highly influential supra-national curriculum and assessment framework. It is understood here that any change in the way in which language proficiency is understood and applied in practice will take more than a shift in curricular and disciplinary perspective; complex edu-political issues of power connected to, inter alia, policy making, commercial viability (e.g. marketing of textbooks and language tests), institutional and curricular flexibility, and stakeholders’ buy-in (e.g. students, teachers, and academic institutions coalescing into a ‘user community’) will be involved. (Some of these issues will be picked up in the section on translanguging passim.) That said, the main concern of this discussion is with the direction of the intellectual shift, itself a sine qua non for curricular and pedagogic development. In the final part I will draw attention to the conceptual, pedagogic, and assessment issues that require further exploration.

Language proficiency as a curriculum artifact

As Pennycook (2007) observes, it is virtually impossible to capture and know all past and present instances of use of language in society; the English language is no exception. Individual language users’ knowledge and skills may be wide or narrow (inter alia, influenced by biography and experience), but at any one time their language repertoires are related to their real-life activities in particular social milieus. Insofar as it is impossible, and it doesn’t make sense, for language learners to try to learn ‘everything’, teaching and learning an additional language necessarily involves some kind of content selection. Broadly speaking, the contents of a, indeed any, curriculum reflect the selection of particular aspects of culturally valued knowledge and social practice by empowered actors in a particular place and time (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Stenhouse, 1975).

Designing a language curriculum involves (a) defining what counts as the desired knowledge and skills, i.e. proficiency, and (b) deciding what to include as well as delimiting what should be included. Language proficiency is thus a form of entelechy – it is brought about by authorized actors, e.g. examination authorities, introducing some form of selected content for learning and/or pre-specified performance outcomes. So as an artifact the concept of proficiency is designed to describe, and very often, prescribe the knowledge and skills deemed to be necessary and/or desirable for particular individual and groups of language users in a real-world context, e.g. X level of proficiency for university entrance or employment. It does not have a prior material or independent existence outside an educational or vocational/professional scheme. This reificatory process is conventionally accomplished through curriculum design that embodies learning content specifications, learning outcome statements and rating scales for assessment. Therefore, what counts as proficiency is not in itself immutable; as an artifact it can be, and is, re-formulated and re-defined from time to time in response to changing circumstances and intellectual sensibilities. I will now turn to the shifting views on English Language proficiency within ELT since the late 1970s.

Language proficiency in ELT – stability and change

It would be reasonable to suggest that the intellectual hinterland of ELT – conceptualizations of language proficiency, pedagogically oriented research, developments in curriculum, teacher standards and teacher education schemes, assessment frameworks, and so on – in the past five decades have been strongly influenced by the concept of communicative competence. Building on the anthropological-ethnographic impulse in the works of Hymes, Gumperz and many others, ELT adopted a pedagogic view of language learning and language proficiency that is modeled on how people actually use language for communication in real-life contexts (as opposed to a narrower focus on vocabulary and grammar with exemplifications of usage). The seminal article by Canale and Swain (1980) on communicative approaches to language teaching can be seen as a zeitgeist of the paradigm that continues to exert substantial influence on ELT theorizing in the Anglophone academy and professional practices to this day. The pedagogic emphasis on modeling real-life language use meant that sociocultural expectations and pragmatic conventions of language use became a prominent part of teaching content and proficiency descriptors. In this kind of approach there is a palpable sense that ‘language learners should do as the natives do.’ And some of the proficiency descriptors reflect this concern explicitly, for instance:

IELTS Speaking (public version, https://assets.ctfassets.net/unrdeg6se4ke/mXLIv4Gi5tRicQNXuLkDK/3ef7e99b87f9d8d683cb4827c1cd4135/speakingbanddescriptors.pdf, accessed November 2023):

Band 9

Under Fluency and Coherence: ‘speaks coherently with fully appropriate cohesive features’

Under Lexical Resource: ‘uses idiomatic language naturally and accurately’

Under Grammatical Range and Accuracy: ‘produces consistently accurate structures apart from ‘“slips”’ characteristic of native speaker speech’

Given that it is not possible to know ‘everything’ in a language, the qualifying terms such as ‘coherently’ and ‘appropriate’ are normed on a particular selected variety or type of language use. ‘Idiomatic language’ and ‘native speaker speech’ are referenced to the kind of knowledge and practices associated with that of a preferred segment of the target language community/ies. It is widely recognized that curricularized versions of English tend to reflect the kinds of language use by the ‘educated’ speaker in public semi-formal situations such as work or service encounters. Similar descriptors as those cited above can be seen in other well-established internationally recognized English proficiency frameworks, rating scales and teaching materials. All of this has contributed to a purview of the English language as comprising known and stable features both in terms of the lexicogrammar and conventions of use (For a detailed discussion of this development see Leung, 2022). The stability of this pedagogically delimiting view of English has been disrupted by studies in the fields of applied language studies and applied linguistics. I will refer to some of the insights relevant to this discussion from the fields of academic literacies, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and translanguaging to illustrate the complexifying insights into the uses of English. The studies mentioned below are cited for illustrative purposes; it is not claimed here that they form an exhaustive survey. The section on translanguaging is more extensive as it bears (more) directly on the ensuing discussion with reference to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

From studies of communicative language use in educational settings

There are, broadly speaking, three areas of research concerned with communicative language use in academic and or classroom settings that have thrown light on the diverse range of language use for a variety of purposes. The first is ethnographically oriented studies of literacy practices. The works in this area have shown that there are observable diversities in different academic disciplines; reading and writing are embedded in different subject-related epistemologies and teaching-learning activities. For instance, what counts as appropriate content for an essay can vary from discipline to discipline; indeed academics, as temporal authorities in their subject, may work to different norms and values regarding genre, register and text types (e.g. Bloome et al., 2022, Lea and Street 1998, 2006; Leung, in press; Leung & Street, 2014; Scott & Lillis, 2008). The second is corpus-based studies of academic registers which have shown that there are noticeable variations across different disciplines in terms of content-related text types, modes of argument, referencing, and authorial voice (e.g. Biber, 2006; Nesi & Gardner, 2012; Staples et al., 2018; Tribble & Wingate, 2013; Weigle & Friginal, 2015; Wingate, 2015). The third area is discourse analysis of teacher/tutor–student interaction. The studies in this area have pointed to the wide range of interactional language use, e.g. teacher-fronted talk, student disputing teacher’s judgments, that are as likely to be related to inter-personal relations and power differentials as they are related to didactic transactions (e.g. Bloome et al., 2022; Leung & Street, 2012, 2017; Leung et al., 2004; Wingate & Ogiermann, 2022).

From English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) studies

The research by scholars working in the field of ELF in the past twenty-five years or so has shown the variabilities in the ways in which English is used as a resource for communication in educational, professional and social settings. The significance of this body of work lies in its gaze on English in the world with users from diverse language backgrounds, not just as an intramural phenomenon for English-speaking communities and institutions. The work in ELF has covered several aspects of English. For instance, Jenkins’s phonological studies (2000, 2022) have provided clear indications of the features of pronunciation that are important for effective communication and those that are not, for instance, all consonant sounds are important except the dental fricatives/θ/and/ð/. Corpus-based studies have yielded data showing the malleability of some aspects of English lexicogrammar, e.g. the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English developed by Seidlhofer and her colleagues (2001–2007, https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/corpora/VOICE/), and the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings by Mauranen and her colleagues (2003, https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/english-as-alingua-franca-in-academic-settings) have demonstrated that some lexicogrammatical features of English can be adapted for communicative efficacy, for instance, Ø-marking of third person – s in present simple/infinite tense, turning the so-called uncountable nouns to count nouns, e.g. information to informations. The study of pragmatics in ELF mediated social interactions has shown that the putative norms and practices of the native speaker are not necessarily followed; participants in ELF mediated interactions do not necessarily assume that their interlocutors would share a similar linguacultural background, and for this reason there is a greater propensity for negotiations and adjustments in terms of directness/indirectness, politeness, face work, diversity of pronunciation (e.g. Cogo and House 2017; Jenkins, 2015, 2022; Widdowson, 2015). And more recently the multilingual use of participants’ own languages is recognized as an important feature of ELF communication. Jenkins (2015: 55) comments: ‘… ELF, with its fluidity and “online” negotiation of meaning among interlocutors with varied multilingual repertoires, could not be considered as consisting of bounded varieties, but as English that transcends boundaries … ’

Overall it is quite clear that research has shown that ELF mediated communication diverges from the native speaker norms in terms of lexicogrammatical features and pragmatic use with contingent and localized characteristics. For ELF users:

• English is conceptualized as a code for communication in contexts where participants in social interaction are from different language backgrounds; the English used in English-speaking countries is not necessarily a point of reference

• clarity of meaning is a communicative goal, i.e. grammatical correctness and native speaker-like pragmatics and pronunciation are not key priorities

• accommodation of one another’s English proficiency is pragmatically negotiated contingently in situ

• accommodation and understanding of fellow participants’ own linguacultural practices are taken into consideration

• the use of participants’ own multilingualism is a part of the situated communicative repertoire.

(Also see Batziakas 2016; Cogo and Dewey 2012: chapter 5; Jenkins, 2015; Kankaanranta and Planken, 2010; Leung and Jenkins, 2020).

From translanguaging studies in educational settings

The concept of translanguaging has been invoked to cover a wide range of educational settings where linguistic resources from two or more languages are called upon to facilitate communication and learning in different world locations. The concept has also given rise to an impetus to explore the possible impacts of translingualism on students’ socio-cognitive and educational dispositions (Garcia & Wei, 2014; Jaspers 2018; Li 2018). A good deal of classroom research draws on the exploratory energy generated by this concept. Scope and space preclude a full account of the research in this domain. Here I will attempt to sketch out some of the reported perceptions and sensibilities of students and teachers by tapping into a sample of four published articles covering issues of pedagogy, participant affect and educational policy. The first three articles report empirical classroom-based investigations in three different world locations; the fourth article offers a curriculum view on pedagogical translanguaging. The diverse insights and concerns discussed in these articles can be seen as part of the complex mosaic of the unfolding concepts of language and language proficiency.

Rafi (2022) investigate student uptake of translanguaging in teaching and assessment among a group of first-year students at an English-medium university in Bangladesh. The students at this university are recruited from a range of school backgrounds – Bangla-medium, English-medium, Madrassa and so on. The study explored the responses of a group of six students to a pedagogic intervention involving the use of Bangla and translanguaging in an English reading activity and writing assessments. The datasets included classroom observations, an interview with the participant teacher and a focus group discussion. The authors report that generally only the students from English-medium secondary education felt comfortable with the all-English teaching, the others found it difficult to follow lectures, participate in discussion, and understand English curriculum materials; some students found their inability to participate fully ‘depressing’ and ‘detrimental to [their] mental health and well-being’ (p37). More specifically, the student feedback on the translanguaging intervention was positive; they felt that they had understood the reading lesson – ‘… we could immediately participate in the quiz in English’ (p38). In one of the three writing assessment tasks the students were invited to write translingually using Bangla, English or other languages – ‘We wrote well what we felt. If we were to write in only English, we would have failed to express so many things. Ideas that felt comfortable writing in English, we wrote those in English and followed the same process in Bangla’ (p39). The authors note that the participant teacher expressed a sense of tension, hesitation and ‘guilt’ in allowing students to translanguage (in an English-medium institution).

Fang and Liu (2020) explore the translanguaging practices and teacher and student attitudes to translanguaging in a university located in south-eastern China. The university offers English classes and some English-medium content courses. The datasets included classroom observations, an online student questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews with teachers. Five teachers participated in the study; 162 students took part in the online questionnaire and 900 minutes of classroom teaching were recorded and analyzed. The authors observe that in the classes where teachers engaged in translanguaging, it was used to serve five functions: concept/language point explanation, comprehension check, instruction reinforcement, creation of class support and content knowledge localization. All five functions are clearly pedagogically oriented to support student understanding and rapport. Content knowledge localization, however, points to an additional dimension of translanguaging, that is, by appealing to students’ background local knowledge in Chinese the teachers were activating a local language-local knowledge connection to support the learning and use of English. The students’ questionnaire responses indicated that they were supportive of translanguaging practices, particularly on the part of the teachers. They thought translanguaging was helpful for language learning and for building confidence in using English. Of the five participant teachers two of them, both English language teachers (the others were content teachers), were supportive of translanguaging. Two of the teachers, both law school teachers, would occasionally used translanguaging and translation when necessary to convey content meaning. One of the teachers was completely against the use of the students’ own language in the classroom. The authors reported that the official curriculum policy influenced these teachers’ reluctance and resistance to embracing translanguaging in their teaching.

Adamson and Coulson (2015) report a study that investigated translanguaging as a ‘pragmatic means’ to promote critical academic writing for first-year students in a Japanese university. The students were on a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course. The course was partial English-medium – the teaching was mediated through Japanese and English. The study was focussed on the ‘lower’ English proficiency students (as identified by a placement test), as these students were perceived to be in need of more study support. The datasets, compiled over three years, included student questionnaire responses and end-of-year written reports (as part of the assessment for a lecture preparation course designed to support students engaging with lectures in English). A total of 271 end-of-year reports were analyzed with reference to L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) references and other in-text features of Japanese. The overall findings pointed to the usefulness of the use of Japanese for class activities and for the written reports and the importance of L1-L2 translation of reference materials, which ‘illustrated the Japanese perspective on particular issues’ (p10). There was a drop in the use of Japanese references over the three-year period. The authors surmised that this might have something to do with the report topics in the first year of the study (2011–2012), a time coincided with the Fukushima tsunami and the nuclear disaster, which were covered in the Japanese media more extensively than other topics in the other two years (of the research period). The questionnaire data also showed that the students appreciated the use of Japanese in the lectures.

Iversen (2019) explores the concept of pedagogic translanguaging and its implications in the teaching of English in Norway with reference to the recently revised national curriculum. It would seem that as Norwegian society becomes increasingly more ethnolinguistically diverse, the official curriculum authorities are acknowledging the relevance of cultural diversity and translanguaging in school education for students from all language backgrounds. Of particular interest to this discussion is the recognition that there should be close links between languages – Norwegian, English and other languages. The subject English is assigned a portmanteau role in the revised national curriculum published in 2019. The following is an English translation of a relevant passage in the national curriculum statement:

‘English is a central subject for cultural understanding, communication, education, and identity development. The subject shall provide students with the ability to communicate with others locally and globally, regardless of cultural and linguistic background. English shall contribute to develop students’ intercultural understanding of different ways of life, ways of thinking, and communication patterns’. (Op.cit.:57)

Teachers are encouraged to include the use of students’ own home languages in the teaching of English. The curriculum explicitly states that from Year 4 (senior primary) onwards students are expected to have the competence to ‘discover and play with words and expressions shared by English and other languages the student knows’ (loc.cit.). And ‘… after year 11, student should apply their knowledge about the connections between English and other languages the student knows …’ (loc.cit.). Quite clearly the revised national curriculum statements present the subject of English as a site where ethnolinguistic diversity in the school community is valued as a language learning-teaching resource and as an educational goal. (Also see Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2019 English translation https://data.udir.no/kl06/v201906/laereplaner-lk20/ENG01–04.pdf?lang=eng)

(For a broader discussion on translanguaging, see Anderson & Lightfoot, 2021; Canagarajah, 2011; Cenoz & Gorter, 2017a, 2017b; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009; García & Kleyn, 2016; García & Lin, 2016; García & Sánchez, 2015; Garcia & Wei, 2014; Leung & Valdés, 2019; Paulsrud et al., 2017, 2021).

Plurilingualism and mediation in the common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR)

The CEFR is a well recognized reference for additional/second language teaching, curriculum development and assessment produced by the Council of Europe, a supranational organization concerned with human rights, and cultural and educational developments. The first version of the CEFR was published in 2001. The influence of the CEFR reaches well beyond its European home; it has been adopted as a key reference by national educational authorities around the world for a variety of purposes. For instance, the English language requirements for migration in Australia and UK are benchmarked against CEFR proficiency levels; the English language component of school education in Malaysia is CEFR-informed; and the foreign language curriculum (e.g. German, Indonesian, and Japanese) in New Zealand is referenced to the CEFR.

The CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) sets out an action-oriented approach to language use in language learning-teaching:

‘Language use, embracing language learning, comprises the actions performed by persons who as individuals and as social agents develop a range of competences, both general and in particular communicative language competences. They draw on competences at their disposal in various contexts under various conditions and under various constraints to engage in language activities … ’ (op.cit.:9, original italics)

The language competences are expressed in the form of ‘can-do’ statements. These can-do statements are arrayed on six hierarchical reference levels of proficiency (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2; C2 is the highest level); they populate the various language proficiency rating scales covering spoken and written language use in general terms and in variety of specific domains of language use, e.g.

Table

	OVERALL ORALL PRODUCTION
C2	Can produce clear, smoothly flowing well-structured speech with an effective logical structure which helps the recipient to notice and remember significant points.
C1	Can give clear, detailed description and presentations on complex subjects, integrating sub-themes, developing particular points and rounding off with an appropriate conclusion.

(Op.cit.: 58)

Table

	READING FOR INFORMATION AND ARUMENT
A2	Can identify specific information in simpler written material he/she encounters such as letters, brochures and short newspaper articles describing events.
A1	Can get an idea of the content of simpler information material and short simple descriptions especially if there is visual support.

(Op.cit.: 70)

In broad terms, the idea of language proficiency in the CEFR, as it was articulated in the 2001 version, reflected the tenets of the concept of communicative competence as it has been understood since the late 1970s (see earlier reference to Canale & Swain, 1980). Indeed the CEFR reference levels of proficiency in terms of the use of spoken and written language are routinely invoked to benchmark language courses and teaching materials that are communicatively oriented (see Leung, 2022 for a more detailed account). Of particular interest to this discussion is the expanded notion of language proficiency in the CEFR Companion Volume (CV, Council of Europe, 2020) with particular reference to plurilingualism and mediation.

Plurilingualism in the 2001 CEFR refers to an individuals using more than one language in their communication with others in a way that does not keep their languages (including dialects and varieties) in ‘separate mental compartments’; instead, they ‘can flexibly upon different parts of this competence to achieve effective communicative with a particular interlocutor (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 4). This notion of fluid individual plurilingualism is further elaborated under the action-oriented approach in the CV in 2020 to include the following characteristics of dynamic language use:

• ‘switch from one language or dialect (or variety) to another;

• express oneself in one language (or dialect, or variety) and understand a person speaking another;

• call upon the knowledge of a number of languages … to make sense of a text …

• mediate between individuals with no common language … even with only a slight knowledge oneself;

• bring the whole of one’s linguistic equipment into play, experimenting with alternative forms of expression …’

(Council of Europe, 2020, p. 30)

Mediation in the 2001 CEFR is formulated as a technical facilitation of communication involving the use of translation from one language to another. In the 2020 CV mediation is extended considerably to include emotional intelligence and a convivially collaborative stance in social interaction:

A person who engages in mediation activity needs to have a well-developed emotional intelligence, or an openness to develop it, in order to have sufficient empathy for the view points and emotional states of other participants in the communicative situation.’ (Op.cit.:91)

Emotional intelligence is needed because mediation is:

… a social and cultural process of creating conditions for communication and cooperation, facing and hopefully defusing any delicate situations and tensions that may arise. Particularly with regard to cross-lingual mediation, users should remember that this inevitably also involves social and cultural competence as well as plurilingual competence. (Loc.cit.)

Mediation, as a social and cultural process, can occur in three types of activities:

• mediating a text [which] ‘involves passing on to another person the content of a text to which they do not have access’ and responding to creative texts

• mediating concepts [which takes place in] ‘the process of facilitating access to knowledge and concepts for others, particularly if they may be unable to access this directly on their own’

• mediating communication [which] ‘aims to facilitate understanding and shape successful communication between users/learners who may have individual, sociocultural, sociolinguistics or intellectual differences in standpoint.’ (Loc.cit.)

In the next section, I will provide a composite view of the ways in which English, and language more generally, is perceived and used in real world educational settings.

Language in use – a re-discovered territory for ELT

Taken as a whole the empirical and conceptual accounts mentioned above point to considerable complexity and fluidity in the ways that language is used as a means of communication for teaching and learning. In relation to the use of English in educational settings we can see that:

• the use of English can differ in different disciplinary areas in terms of content-related register and genre

• the use of language in the classroom is not necessarily restricted to pedagogic transactions; social relations can enter into participant interactions which points to the use of language for inter-personal and social purposes

• teaching English does not necessarily mean monolingual English communication in teaching and learning activities; the use of students’ own languages is seen as a legitimate facility to support learning and communication more generally, and to enhance the quality of learning experience

• using English as a Lingua Franca for communication does not mean strict adherence to the linguistic and pragmatic conventions associated with putative native speaker practices; the use of participants’ own linguistic and cultural repertoires is part of lingua franca communication

• inclusive use of students’ own languages in the teaching of English can support inter-cultural understanding (in relation to the embedded cultural meanings in target language material) and multiculturalism more generally (see Liddicoat & Scarino, 2024)

• use of language in social interaction involves a sensitivity to the communicative needs of interlocutors and a convivial disposition to support the accomplishment of mutual/collective understanding

• accomplishing effective communication in social interaction includes mediating communicative obstacles and facilitating understanding among participants by using (any) shared plurilingual resources at hand where appropriate.

All of this strongly suggests that the intellectual sensibilities in ELT have moved away from the implicitly ‘only English for ELT’ approach that has populated the academic discussions and teaching materials up until quite recently. We should acknowledge though that the use of students’ own languages in ELT has not actually disappeared in the classroom, as noted by Littlewood and Yu (2011) and Hall and Cook (2012); it has just been sidelined somewhat in the academic and professional literature. Furthermore, in the wider educational research literature reference to the schooling education, particularly with reference to students from diverse language backgrounds in English-speaking education systems, the importance of recognizing and building on students’ multilingual resources has been extensively discussed (e.g. Cummins, 1979, 1980, 2000, 2018; Jacobson & Faltis, 1990; Lin, 2001, 2006, amongst others). It may well be that the advent of the empirically driven work in ELF and translanguaging in the past two decades has helped to loosen the grip of the taken-for-granted monolingual doctrine that can be traced back to Reform Movement in second language teaching in the late 19^th century (Cook, 2010, Chapter 1; Cummins, 2007). The removal of the references to the ‘native speaker’ and the extended recognition of plurilingualism in the CEFR CV can be seen as a totemic change in the domain assumptions in language education more generally.

It is noteworthy that the bodies of scholarly work cited in the previous section have, in one way or another, report the ‘localizing’ nature of language use. In studies of academic literacy practices, we see a diversity in discipline-related language practices; in explorations of ELF-mediated interaction and translanguaging in English teaching activities, we see a regard for situated and contingent uses of participant multi-linguacultural resources. In addition, the inclusion of the need for emotional intelligence as part of convivial social interaction foregrounds the constitutive part participants play in accomplishing agentive communication. These research-derived insights are leading us to re-discover an overlooked but core issue in ELT – What do people do with language when communicating with others in context? Hitherto, few would dispute that a good deal of ELT discussions in curriculum design, pedagogic approaches and teacher education have tended to be framed with established precepts drawn from expert-led research and related theorizing on how language communication works and what supports language learning. The communicative approach in ELT, for instance, offers a pedagogic framework to assemble particular configurations of language knowledge and skills at various levels of learning in different domains of use (e.g. Hedge, 2000; Littlewood, 1984). Student learning outcomes, often identified through language proficiency testing, are explained in terms of students’/test takers’ ability (however defined). The validity and applicability of established notions of communicative language use have been taken for granted. However, the increasing awareness of the diverse ways in which language resources are used in different disciplinary domains and contexts, and the fluid nature of ELF and translanguaging language use has energized questions of validity, applicability, and durability in relation to any universalizing approach to the use of English in its many real-world guises. There is a common concern underpinning the studies mentioned in the previous section: What does language in use look like in social interaction when we give due recognition to participants’ use of their language resources, and to the contingently agentive nature of social interaction in particular domains? In many ways this was a prime intellectual concern in the anthropological and ethnographic works of Gumperz (e.g. Gumperz, 1964, 1997), Hymes (e.g. Hymes, 1964, 1974), and many others that laid the foundations of the established communicative approach in ELT. The reemergence of this critically important issue has raised a key conceptual question with pedagogic implications – What is English language proficiency?

Language proficiency or varieties of language proficiencies?

The point of departure of this discussion is that empirical insights from the works in related research fields such as use of language in classroom settings, academic literacies, ELF and translanguaging have started to inform some basic tenets of ELT. We are now sensitized to the following:

• there is no unitary or universally model of language use in different educational or social domains

• using English for communication in social interaction with others from diverse language backgrounds can involve plurilingual mediation; English is but one of the many different linguacultural resources in use

• (by extension) ELT is an inherently multilingual pedagogic space involving students’ own languages, even where there is no explicit guidance for its recognition at curriculum or policy level

• emotional intelligence is needed to support and facilitate felicitous communication in social interaction.

All of these insights clearly militate against a fundamental pedagogic assumption in ELT programmes – that what we intend to teach, as represented by curricular statements and pedagogic materials – can help to bring about pre-specified learning outcomes, and that student learning outcomes are assessable with clear criteria (e.g. Christison and Murray, 2022). In ELT, and language education more generally, we have used the concept of ‘proficiency’ to capture this aspect of pedagogy. Thus, we organize classes with reference to proficiency levels, and we design language tests that are meant to identify test-takers’ proficiency levels or bands. Likewise in language assessment we are advised that: ‘The population(s) for which a test is appropriate should be delimited clearly, and the construct or constructs that the test is intended to assess should be described clearly’ (AERA, APA, NCME, 2014, p. 23, emphasis added). This educational enterprise is built on the bedrock belief that the epistemological foundations underpinning curricular and pedagogic approaches adequately reflect the ways in which English is used in real-life settings.

The more close-up views of how people use English in social interaction uncovered by empirical investigations have invited us to look at what counts as proficiency afresh. It seems that there are two questions that can serve as starting points for further exploration. The first is concerned with the issue of domain- or field-related language proficiency. Academically and professionally we have tended to operate at a high level of categorical abstraction that blends substantively different areas within a field. For instance, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) covers all kinds of use of English in different disciplines. Ethnographically oriented studies in academic literacies have shown diverse language practices across different disciplines.² How far we should now disaggregate EAP as a global proficiency into separate academic proficiencies is now an apt question. The same question can be raised in relation to other specific domains of language use, e.g. how far is the conceptualization of English for Nursing sufficiently delicate in descriptive terms to reflect the different areas of practice in that domain?

The second question is related to the interactionally enacted aspects of language in use. The hitherto mostly monolingually conceptualized English language proficiency frameworks may claim legitimacy where they are used in contexts where interlocutors are monolingual English speakers, or where they are required to only use English in interactional exchanges. However, where interactions take place in social spaces (both in-person and online) where participants’ own language knowledge and skills are part of the resources for communication and where effective communication is a primary goal, then monolingually oriented language proficiency frameworks are not fit-for-purpose. The CEFR CV is a notable exception. The extended notion of mediation as a constituent part of language proficiency foregrounds contingency and plurilingualism. We can see this as a pioneering move toward an empirically more informed approach to language proficiency in many contemporary settings. In its wake, we can begin to explore some interestingly challenging issues for language teaching and assessment.

In terms of curriculum specification of proficiency, if mediation is expected to involve the use multilingual language resources flexibly and where appropriate, then how and how far should ELT pedagogy now incorporate insights of inventive and situated instances of cross-lingual lexico-grammatical and pragmatic use from ELF studies? If plurilingualism is part of English-medium communication, how and how far should translanguaging pedagogy be brought into ELT at both curriculum and teaching levels systematically? If emotional intelligence is now regarded as a prime motor to drive convivial communication in a contingently agentive way, then we will need to be clear as to what it entails in social conduct (Mayer et al., 2016) and how it can be engendered in language teaching.

In terms of assessment of proficiency in actual communicative use, if plurilingual language use is expected in ELF-mediated interactions where participants are from diverse language backgrounds, then two immediate issues follow: how much plurilingualism and ELF usage should be regarded as necessary and appropriate, and how does one adjudge their contribution to communicative accomplishment (see Ockey and Hirsch 2020 for discussion on assessment of ELF). These broad quantitative and qualitative issues will call for further conceptual and empirical investigations in a context sensitive way (see Schissel et al., 2019 for a further discussion). Furthermore, if emotional intelligence as an ability is part of language proficiency, then we will need to be explicit about the interactional exchange points at which it should be activated, and what would count as effective enactment.

Beyond these more immediate curricular and pedagogic issues, there is a broader ontological-cum-theoretical question of proficiency as an abstracted index of sociolingual reality. How useful is an abstracted concept of proficiency that captures only some lexicogrammatical and pragmatic characteristics as a form of performative generalization for curriculum planners and teachers? Such an approach necessarily leaves a good deal of room for practitioners to backfill, make local adaptations and interpretations. Or would it be more efficacious to go ‘local’ in the first stance? Instead of proceeding with a top-down model of proficiency (from curriculum-examination authorities or test providers), curriculum designers, teachers and assessment professional working at an appropriate local level – be it geographic, institutional, or political – can be invited to actively and collectively contribute to the development of teaching and assessment frameworks that consciously reflect local language practices (O’Sullivan & Chalhoub-Deville, 2021 for a related discussion). Locally informed understanding of how social interaction is at the heart of going ‘local’ (see Roever & Dai, 2021, inter alia, on interactional competence). At this point of our search for a more empirically informed understanding what language proficiency means in real-life spoken communication, we may usefully turn to adjacent fields of research such as Conversation Analysis (e.g. Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015) and Community Interpreting (e.g. Han et al., 2024; Runcieman, 2023) which have been paying attention to the ways in which people accomplish communication through interactional talk that reflect interlocutors’ (pluri-) linguistic repertoires in context. In relation to written language communication, we already have some understanding of the diverse genres and practices in different academic and professional settings (as indicated earlier). To develop our understanding further, it would be useful to explore, inter alia, how far the observed diversity is reflected in the evaluation and assessment of student writings in different domains, and how and how far such evaluation and assessment ‘approaches’ are in line with discipline-oriented practices and associated curricular frameworks.

Concluding remarks

By taking stock of the still developing bodies of work in academic literacies, ELF and translanguaging it is now possible to see that some of the foundational assumptions and values underlying the internationalized ELT enterprise are in need of further examination. The universality, stability and durability generally assumed in the concept of language proficiency in ELT are beginning to look like a chimera. It is somewhat ironic that the insights from empirical studies of actual language use in diverse contexts have reminded us the need to pay attention to real-life language practices. This is the kind of knowledge and understanding that the ethnographically derived theories of language communication had alerted us to at the onset of the communicative approach to language teaching – an approach widely endorsed by ELT. To make the concept of language proficiency work better in real-world settings, we should develop a close-up view of language proficiencies in different domains and contexts. Along the way we should also take account of the nature and affordances of multilingualism and participant agency in ELT. This de-centering of ELT is likely to require the unpicking of a century-old enterprise. But it would be in tune with a commitment to pay attention to our knowledge and understanding of how language/s works in the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘ELT’ is used here to refer to the teaching of English as additional/second language as a subject in schools and universities around the world (e.g. English for Academic Purposes, English-medium programmes), and in fee-paying language teaching institutions for learners of all ages in a variety of academic and professional programmes.

2. For a relevant account of the reduction of discipline-specific language tests in the development of IELTS, see Davies (2008).