Assessment Objects

The NFLC creates Assessment Objects (AOs) as instructional modules to help U.S. Government linguists and others prepare for general language proficiency tests, especially fifth generation Defense Language Proficiency Tests in strategic languages.

While they are intended to give potential test takers a stronger sense of the types of items such tests contain, AOs are not practice tests. Instead, they aim to help learners more broadly by showing them which aspects of stimuli are addressed in such tests, what typical prompts look like, what conditions and restrictions obtain in such tests, and more specifically, what level of difficulty can be expected at Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) level 3 and 3+ in terms of text and task.

AOs are designed to expose conscientious language learners to real language samples and thoughtful tasks that strengthen their general proficiency and thereby boost their confidence as high stakes test takers.

The Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Scale is a set of descriptive rubrics that attempts to capture the types of language knowledge, as well as paralinguistic knowledge, speakers of a foreign language should have at each of five levels.