FOR MANY SCHOLARS of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign languages (FL), the profession has moved beyond the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines. Many see the guidelines as obsolete and severely doubt, with the contemporary emphasis on “multiple literacies,” “translingualism,” and “transculturalism” as the preferred student learning outcomes in FL programs, whether an emphasis on proficiency can really contribute anything meaningful to graduate student training. This doubt notwithstanding, we should not overlook the undeniable pedagogical value for teachers in training of a foundational knowledge of and facility with the guidelines. Indeed, with this training, teachers gain solid awareness of the process that undergraduate students go through to acquire an advanced level of language and cultural proficiency as well as the level of engagement and effort it takes on the part of both teachers and students to progress through these levels. For these reasons, in addition to outlining the positive contribution the guidelines can make to graduate training, it is necessary to respond to some of the criticisms of both the guidelines and the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI).

It is hardly controversial to assert that good teaching in any field, and especially in FL, relies in part on effective teacher development. Furthermore, most of us would agree that nonnative graduate students in FL need professional development in three major roles: FL teacher, future FL colleague, and continuing FL learner, while native speakers need development in the first two of these areas. Drawing on my own graduate training as well as my transition to assistant (and now associate) professor of German at Auburn University, I advocate for the reinvigorated use of the guide lines to strengthen all of the above aspects of professional development. Graduate students who are given the guidelines as actual guidelines, rather than as simple prescriptive measures, have an important tool with which to develop pedagogical goals and methods that integrate form and meaning, and language and culture, throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Independent of the specific curricular issues that one must consider, the ability to make informed decisions of this nature is vital to the future of the profession.