The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines - Speaking (1986) have gained widespread application as a metric against which to measure learners' functional competency; that is, their ability to accomplish linguistic tasks representing a variety of levels. Based on years of experience with oral testing in governmental institutions and on the descriptions of language proficiency used by Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR), the ACTFL Guidelines were an adaptation intended for use in academia (college and university levels particularly) in the United States. For this reason, the authors of the Provisional Guidelines (1982) conflated the top levels (ILR 3-5), expanded the descriptions of the lower levels (ILR 0-1), and defined sublevels of competency according to the experience of language instructors and researchers accustomed to beginning learners. Their efforts were further modified and refined in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines published in 1986.

After additional years of oral testing and of interpretation of the Guidelines, as well as numerous research projects, scholarly articles, and debates, the time has come to reevaluate and refine the Guidelines, initially those for Speaking, followed by those for the other skills. The purposes of this revision of the Proficiency Guidelines Speaking are to make the document more accessible to those who have not received recent training in ACTFL oral proficiency testing, to clarify the issues that have divided testers and teachers, and to provide a corrective to what the committee perceived to have been possible misinterpretations of the descriptions provided in earlier versions of the Guidelines.

An important example is the treatment of the Superior level. The ILR descriptions postulate a spectrum of proficiency abilities from 0 which signifies no functional competence, to 5 which is competence equivalent to that of a well-educated native speaker. Due to the language levels most often attained by adult learners, the ACTFL Guidelines do not include descriptions of the highest ILR levels. The ACTFL Superior level, roughly equivalent to the ILR 3 range, is thus to be seen as a baseline level; that is, it describes a particular set of functional abilities essential to that level, but not necessarily the whole range of linguistic activities that an educated speaker with years of experience in the target language and culture might attain. Keeping this distinction in mind reduces the tendency to expect the Superior speaker to demonstrate abilities defined at higher ILR levels.