Why Kungfucius rates the ILR scale
Kungfucius considers the ILR a good framework, in some ways the most honest of the lot. It grew out of the scale that the US Foreign Service Institute began using in the 1950s to describe what its diplomats could really do, and it still reads like a job description. Three things make it useful to ordinary learners too.
- Each skill is rated separately. A profile such as S-2/R-3 says that someone speaks at level 2 and reads at level 3, which is how real learners of Chinese or Japanese tend to look.
- The plus levels. Level 2+ means you have clearly passed 2 and cannot yet sustain 3. Most learners live in these in-between places for years, and the ILR admits it.
- A sober top end. Level 3, professional working proficiency, is what the Foreign Service trains towards. Levels 4 and 5 are rare even among people who use the language for a living, which is a useful cure for the word "fluent".
Its weakness is practical. There is no ILR certificate you can simply book as a private learner, so outside US government work the scale serves as a yardstick, not a diploma.
How ILR relates to CEFR and ACTFL
The European counterpart is the CEFR, with its six levels from A1 to C2. The American classroom counterpart is the ACTFL scale, which was developed from the ILR and divides the lower levels more finely. The FSI categories are a different kind of thing: they rank languages by how long English speakers need to reach ILR 3, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean sit in the hardest group. All the frameworks are collected under language levels.
| ILR |
ACTFL |
CEFR (approximate) |
| 0+ |
Novice High |
A1 |
| 1 |
Intermediate Low, Intermediate Mid |
A2 |
| 1+ |
Intermediate High |
B1 |
| 2 |
Advanced Low, Advanced Mid |
B1 to B2 |
| 2+ |
Advanced High |
B2 to C1 |
| 3 |
Superior |
C1 |
| 4 and 5 |
Distinguished and beyond |
C2 and beyond |
Treat every row as approximate. No official ILR to CEFR conversion exists, and published tables disagree by up to a full level in the middle of the scale. The ACTFL column reflects how the ACTFL guidelines were derived from the ILR. The CEFR column leans on ACTFL's own linking studies, which found that the match differs by skill: an ACTFL Superior rating in speaking corresponds to C2, while Superior in reading or listening corresponds to C1. ACTFL also stresses that these correspondences work in one direction only, from its tests to the CEFR.
For Asian languages, add one more caution. A reading level in Chinese or Japanese costs far more hours than the same level in Spanish, so learners often carry speaking and reading levels that are a full step apart.
What to do next
- Use the ILR descriptions above as a self-check, one skill at a time, and write down your profile as S, L, R and W.
- To compare it with exam levels such as HSK, JLPT or TOPIK, go through the CEFR in the equivalence table.
