SSLA, 10, 181-195. Printed in the United States of America.

PROFICIENCY
Understanding the Construct

James P. Lantolf William Frawley

University of Delaware

In this article we argue against a definitional approach to oral proficiency and in favor of a principled approach based on sound theoretical considerations. We first identify four problematic trends in the oral proficiency movement as it is currently conceived: the tail wagging the dog, false authenticity, premature institutionalization, and the psychometric posture. Thereafter, we offer the rudiments of a principled theory of oral proficiency, based on the theory of higher forms of human cognitive activity developed by the Vygotskyan school of psycholinguistics. The theory compels us to bring into focus such factors as open systems, the individual speaker, functional systems, and intersubjectivity. From this perspective, we argue that if the construct of oral proficiency is to have any significance at all for language teaching and testing, researchers must come to understand what it means for real speakers (natives as well as nonnatives) to interact with other real speakers in the everyday world of human activity rather than in the world circumscribed by language tests.

In an earlier article (Lantolf & Frawley, 1985a), we examined what at that time we perceived as serious problems with the nature and implementation of the A C T F L / ETS/Interagency (AEI) Guidelines (1986). Unfortunately, the issues raised in that study have largely gone unaddressed by supporters of the Oral Proficiency (OP) movement. Unless those issues are resolved, the proficiency test cannot be seen as anything more than what we claimed in 1985: a criterion-reductive, analytically derived, norm-referenced test of how well an mdividual can deal with an imposition.' Our intent in the present article is to examine briefly some of what we see as disturbing developments

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in the O P movement in only the last year and to begin to move beyond the Guidelines themselves in order to develop a theoretical understanding of the construct of proficiency.

PROBLEMATIC TRENDS IN RECENT RESEARCH O N OP The Tail Wagging the Dog

One of the more interesting, though potentially damaging, developments to appear in the recent literature on O P is that the Guidelines, a creation of human researchers, have come to dictate the perspective of the creators and adherents of O P as to the reality of language use in the everyday world. In this regard, several recent publications raise the fundamental question: "What is proficiency?" (see Byrnes, 1986; Galloway, 1987; Omaggio, 1986). In all of the cases that we have been able to examine, the response to the question is consistently couched within the framework of the Guidelines themselves. Galloway's (1987) article unabashedly tries to define O P a priori. Omaggio (1986) dedicates a section of her manual to "Defining Language Proficiency." In her discussion, she considers various models of communicative competence, including those of Hymes, Munby, Widdowson, and Canale and Swain, all of which are reductionist approaches to communicative competence, because they define communicative competence by reference to a set of constitutional criteria. She then proceeds to a subsection entitled "From Communicative Competence to Proficiency." However, nowhere in her analysis is there any in-depth consideration of proficiency that is independent of the proficiency test itself. Although this is a case of almost perfect circularity (see the remark by Vollmer below), it is also an illustration of our claim that the construct of proficiency, reified in the form of the Guidelines, has begun to determine how the linguistic performance of real people must be perceived. A more explicit example of the tail wagging the dog occurs in Byrnes (1987). In her discussion of the role of the interview in O P testing, Byrnes remarks: "conversely, information questions, which form the backbone of a natural conversation and of solid proficiency testing, represent a minute share of teachers' question inventories" (p. 122). Although it is the case that information questions represent the backbone of O P testing, because they are obviously critical to obtaining a ratable sample of interviewee speech, there is no evidence that we know of to support the contention that such questions are the "backbone of a natural conversation" in the nontest everyday world of human interaction. On the contrary, as Yakubinski (cited in Scinto, 1986) remarks, linguistic dialogue is not at all predicated on the exchange of questions and answers (p. 102). Clearly, the construct itself has come to determine the world, the reverse of proper scientific methodology.

False Authenticity
O P testing adherents claim that the interaction that takes place during the interview is somehow authentic, because there is a listener and because focus is on the message. According to Galloway (1987), "authentic tasks are those which invite the learner to

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do what would be done, in much the way it would be done, by native users of the language" (p. 50). The problem here, however, is that very little is known about how speakers, native or otherwise, relate linguistic structure to language function in the everyday world (see Genesee, 1984). In this regard, a recent study by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986) has uncovered data that appear to be quite problematic for the above interpretation of authentic. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain have found that in making requests, native speakers of both Hebrew and English use significantly fewer words than do advanced nonnative speakers of either language. Nonnative speakers in their study include more external modifications in making requests than do native speakers. Such verbosity, for reasons that are not directly relevant to the present discussion, "carries the potential for pragmatic failure in general" (p. 171). Interestingly, however, the level of verbosity increases as the linguistic ability of the learners increases: Advanced learners use many more words in their request protocols than do either the native or beginning speakers of the language. The implications of the above findings are curious. In terms of O P testing, the advanced speakers may be said to provide a good ratable sample because they are able to say more than the beginning speakers; yet the beginning speakers are much closer to the native norm (i.e., more authentic) than are the advanced speakers, at least in terms of utterance length. On the other hand, it may be said that native speakers simply provide a bad model for language learners studied by O P because the empirical evidence shows the two to be contrary. In either case, authenticity remains a dubious prospect at best. Just as the Guidelines cannot be said to mirror reality by definition, so tasks cannot be authentic by definition. What matters in authenticity is the perspective of the individual speaker. This important aspect of human behavior has received a fair amount of treatment in the psycholinguistic paradigm that we think is most relevant to serious language testingnamely, Vygotskyan psycholinguistic theory, where situation definition is critical: "Experimenters cannot automatically assume that subjects have defined a situation in the way they [the experimenters] intended" (Wertsch, Minick, & Arns, 1984, p. 160). This is because, as Vygotsky cautions (1979), researchers frequently forget that human beings are always thinking about themselves and that "this process is never without some influence on behavior; a sudden shift in thought during an experiment always has some impact on the subject's overall behavior" (p. 7). Thus, we are in agreement with Edelsky and Draper (in press) when they argue that claims to authenticity do not mean that tests and instructional activities are authentic, no matter how much realia is used or how extensively the activity is camouflaged. In fact, the task of the test overpowers and detracts from the other tasks we may assume the speakers are engaged in. In essence, there is only one task in O P testingthe test. Support for this argument may be found in Lantolf and Frawley (1985a), with evidence taken from Jones's study of how native-speaker role plays fail in an O P test situation.

Premature Institutionalization of OP
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the proficiency movement is the current vogue of institutionalizing the Guidelines not only as curriculum guides but as entrance and

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exit requirements for university and secondary-school language programs. For example, California Community College, the State University System, and the University of California have developed a Statement of Competencies in Languages Other Than English Expected of Entering Freshman, which, although not based exclusively on the A E I Guidelines, at least recognizes the kind of claims made in the AEI. Institutionalization of O P has also taken place at the level of teacher certification. Magnan (1986) reports that several states are quickly moving toward the establishment of proficiency standards for teacher certification, and several others have already instituted such standards for bilingual certification (p. 435). She further states that the University of Minnesota is moving to establish "intermediate-mid" as the minimum score for exiting its two-year language program (p. 434). The University of Pennsylvania also requires an intermediate-mid on the A E I among its battery of exit examinations for language classes. To be sure, we have no quibble with the principle of establishing programmatic entrance and exit requirements, but we strenuously object to the institutionalization of such requirements when they are predicated on something which, in our opinion, is as theoretically and empirically unsound as the A E I Guidelines. Frankly, if the guidelines falsely determine fact and do not square with empirical findings, we have every reason to believe that their institutionalization may not only be premature but also harmful. If the current trend of adoption of O P continues, and it appears that it will, there is the very real danger that people who are unable to meet the specified requirements may be prevented from pursuing the study of language, even if the pursuit is only for personal benefit; they may even be forced to surrender their pursuit of their broader educational goals altogether. At the very least, the real possibility exists that a significant number of individuals who fail to measure up to the standards may well interpret their failure to mean that they have little or no aptitude for learning languages. Consequently, even if the opportunity for additional study is in fact provided, they may well opt not to take advantage of it. Byrnes (1986) observes that although the Guidelines are "far from perfect," they nevertheless "allow us to do some thinking and some practicing that would otherwise not be possible, with the realization that misguided steps may be taken" (p. 10). It is difficult to understand how anything acknowledged as imperfect and experimental can be elevated to the status of requirement. We cannot help but cite the forceful remark of Ochsner (1979): "If chemists juggled their basic units like we [language researchers] do, their laboratories would blow up" (p. 58). Not only are we in agreement with Schulz (1986), who rejects the establishment of proficiency standards "as a sole or dominant base for individual course grades for the generalist or requirement student" (p. 191), but we urge that the Guidelines should be prevented from penetrating any further into the foreign language curriculum than they already have until a sound theory of proficiency has been established and adequately evaluated. The Psychometric Posture Duran (1984), observes that developers of proficiency tests:

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who wish to develop scales of communicative competence skills are unlikely to leave their psychometric perspectivenor should one expect them to. Accordingly, the instrument development strategies for communicative competence skills should adhere to the highest standards of psychometric test design principles, (p. 54)

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From our position, we are no closer to understanding the concept today than we were 20 years ago, precisely because the quest to describe proficiency has been dominated directly and indirectly by psychometric principles. This may well be the result of the tendency on the part of researchers to lose sight of the object of scientific inquiry in order to preserve the integrity of the tools they use to measure the object (Bissert, 1979, p. I 19). Nonetheless, because of the primacy granted to the principles of psychometry, "the fact that it is possible to devise tests on which individuals score arbitrary points does not mean that the quality being measured by the test is really metric. The illusion is provided by the scale" (Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984, p. 91). 3 The lack of agreement among psychometncians on the number of levels to include in a proficiency hierarchy is further indication of the primacy granted to psychometric principles to the detriment of a clear understanding of the concept under investigation. For instance, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale has five levels. Ingram (1985), in his Australian Second Language Proficiency Ratings ( A S L P R ) , proposes nine levels with provision for three additional levels in the event they are needed for fine tuning. Bachman and Savignon (1986) propose a three-level scale. What is missing from all of the scales, as far as we can determine, is sound justification that proficiency is indeed scalable in the manner assumed. As Edelsky (1986) argues in her criticism of Cummins's well-known claims on proficiency, "ladder metaphors for human learning may be appealing but they misrepresent the phenomena and are often used to legitimize certain groups' lower status" (p. 124). Furthermore, even if it turned out that proficiency were indeed scalable as such, test developers owe the prospective consumer of their tests a principled justification for the number of levels included in the scale. Why 5 or 12 or 3? Why not 6 or 95? Moreover, adoption of the psychometric posture has led, not too surprisingly, to the previously mentioned circularity in the definitions of proficiency. Vollmer (1981) points out that after years of investigation the only thing we are able to say about proficiency is that proficiency is what proficiency tests measure (P- 152). What must be done is to set aside the test-based approach to proficiency and to begin to develop a theory of proficiency that is independent of the psychometrics.4 Only after such a theory has been developed and is proven to be consistent and exhaustive by empirical research should we remtroduce the psychometric factor into the picture, with the full realization that such a reintroduction may not be possible, given our earlier remarks on the scalability of human behavior. A similar proposal has already gained widespread support among those pursuing research in mathematics education (see Schoenfeld, in press).

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T O W A R D A PRINCIPLED THEORY O F PROFICIENCY Open System The previous section is an enumeration of some of the major problems associated with O P testing. More detailed criticisms may be found in our other work (Lantolf & Frawley, 1985a). Here, we want to outline a picture of what a serious theory of O P should address. A review of the recent literature on proficiency and communicative competence demonstrates quite clearly that there is nothing even approaching a reasonable and unified theory of proficiency. Ingram (1985) points out that proficiency has been defined in more than one way by more than one researcher. Some have defined it as knowledge of rules; others have defined it as tasks learners can perform and the means for carrying out the tasks linguistically, sociolinguistically, and pragmatically. Some researchers, like Ingram, have argued for distinguishing between a general or underlying proficiency and a specific proficiency. Jarvis (1986), on the other hand, contends that "a meaningful concept of generic proficiency cannot exist" because "there are many proficiencies" (p.20). Cummins et al. (1984) claim that proficiency is linked to personality factors of the individual. In short, proficiency runs the entire gamut of definitions. In Lantolf and Frawley (1985b) we have argued that the definitions of proficiency briefly outlined above represent a self-contained closed system. Current proponents of the A C T F L Guidelines admit as much in saying that the proficiency "guidelines are pro/icienc(/-based" [italics added] (ACTFL, 1986, p. 15). We base our claim on the fact that such approaches prescribe a set of behaviors, whether they be syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic. In all of the approaches, proficiency is seen as behavior derived from an underlying menu, or, to use the term more in vogue, repertoire, which speakers access when circumstances require such access, much in the way an artificial intelligence program operates. According to this point of view, proficiency in some way involves behavioral rules of the following type: If in situation X , take a turn through choice Y 9 0 % of the time. If proficiency is a taxonomy of pragmatic behavior, a closed system, proficiency makers thereby propogate only ideal opportunities for talk, not real opportunities, because they propose to "equip [L2 learners] with a perfectly deterministic subroutine" (Dennett, 1984, p. I19). 5 More important, however, as Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) caution, is that even though scientists write rules of behavior and real people occasionally verbalize them in order to describe their own behavior, this does not mean that actual behavior is determined by a rule system. Experience, memory, and intuition may be what really underly much of higher level human psychological activity, and we have no guarantee that these are constituted by rules in the same way that menus of behavior are. A s Searle (1984) says: "the formal properties of behavior are not sufficient to show that a rule is being followed. In order that the rule be followed, the meaning of the rule has to play some causal role in the behavior" (p. 47). Given Searle's observation, we find it hard to believe that leaps from intermediate-low to intermediate-mid evidence a

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speaker's adherence to the rules of discussing such things as topics beyond immediate needs, to cite the Guidelines.

Individual Speakers
A basic reason for the problems in the O P movement is that, as with computer models of human cognition, real individuals have been either overlooked completely or relegated to a tangential position. Evidence for our claim may be seen in the following remarks by Lowe (1986) and Higgs (1986). Lowe writes, "But one document [the Guidelines] cannot be all things to all peopleto test designers, to raters, to course developers, to materials writers, to classroom teachers, to administrators" (p. 392). Curiously, the individual speaker being tested and rated is not mentioned in Lowe's list of "all people." Higgs states that "a proficiency-oriented approach to language teaching improves the quality of the product we purport to deliver" (p. 8). Although Higgs indirectly, at least, acknowledges individual learners, he unfortunately converts them into a commodity to be displayed in the educational marketplace and delivered like a package of human educational capital. Clearly, the individual, who should be the starting point of research on what proficiency is to begin with, is just output, a result. We realize that it is claimed that, if nothing else, the Guidelines provide for a learnercentered classroom, and there, at least, the individual speaker is consulted to some extent. Bragger (1986), for example, encourages teachers to surrender "some of their authority and to make students more responsible for their own language development" (p. 13). But even on this point there is far from unanimous agreement among researchers, as illustrated by Kramsch (1986), who maintains that the Guidelines are "teacher- and textbook-centered rather than learner-oriented," because "teaching for proficiency seems to require only a slightalbeit imaginativeadjustment of current teaching practices and existing textbooks" (p. 23). Be that as it may, if the Guidelines are truly concerned with the individual learner, then they clearly cannot define proficiency in the format that they do. An investigation of what proficiency really means, if indeed it means anything of theoretical interest, requires that real individuals active in their world be made the primary focus of attention. Nearly two decades ago, Labov (1970) cautioned that ignoring the viewpoint of the speaker may result in a research report on process X whereas the speaker had actually been engaged in process Y. Once human individuals are given priority over the constraints imposed by psychometry, the entire perspective changes. For one thing, there is a difference between individuals who simply react to their world and those who actively create that world. The former, the preferred output or result of all idealized, algorithmically based models of communicative competence, respond deterministically to others who respond deterministically to them. The latter do not operate within a closed deterministic system but within an open system, the developmental outcome of which is impossible to predict on the basis of the initial state of the system. More importantly, the final state of an open system "can be reached from different initial conditions and via different pathways"

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(Valsiner, 1984, p. 66). In a closed system there is one best answer; in an open system there is not. In an open system, the external world (which is not simply the environment in which the individual interacts) is reorganized and redefined in its relevant aspects by the individual; it is not defined/or the individual. Unfortunately for guideline developers, open systems are those which predominate in everyday life (see Rogoff & Lave, 1984, for an excellent collection of studies on human behavior in everyday life).

Functional Systems The theory of higher forms of human psychological activity that takes optimal account of the individual, active in the open system of the everyday world, is that developed by Vygotsky, Luria, and their disciples. We are comfortable with this theory not only because of the priority it assigns to real individuals, but also because it is, without question, the most consistent, exhaustive, parsimonious, and heuristically valuable theory of human cognitive activity (see Vocate, 1987, pp. 154-158). 6 Although we cannot do justice to this theory in the present article, we focus on one aspect of it that is particularly germane to the present discussion. This is what Luria refers to as "the functional systems perspective." A functional system is characterized by the "presence of a constant (invariant) task, performed by variable (variative) mechanisms, bringing the process to a constant (invariant) result" (Luria, 1973, p. 29). When we speak of function in this regard, we are not speaking of a standard linguistic function, such as a speech act, which, according to Luria (1973), is more analogous to the function of a specific bodily tissue, like the pancreasthe function of which is the secretion of insulin. A functional system, rather, is more like the respiratory system, the object or goal of which is to supply oxygen to the alveoli of the lungs and to diffuse it through their cell walls to the blood stream. Respiration is carried out via a complex muscular apparatus, involving the diaphragm, intercostal muscles, and nervous structures in the brain. The final result of the system is always the samedelivery of oxygenbut the way this is achieved may vary. The diaphragm is normally responsible for the expansion and contraction of the thoracic cavity, but if it is damaged, the identical procedure can be accomplished by means of the intercostal muscles (Luria, 1973, p. 29). In essence, breathing via the diaphragm or via the intercostal muscles does not change the nature of the activity of respiration because the goal has not changed. The only way the structure of a process can in fact change is by a change in the goal of the activity. Thus, the nature of any activity is content-free, because its outcome is never tied to a well-defined deterministic set of procedures (i.e., if X then Y). In terms of language proficiency, this analogy points to the fact that the proficiency of a given speaker can never be characterized in any absolute sense, with everyone having the same fit between form and function. To use another analogy, not only do different people have different driving styles in different circumstances, but different people may have different driving styles under the same circumstances. This is what it means to function within an open system.

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In Lantolf and Frawley (1985b), we illustrate in detail the implications of functional systems theory for language proficiency by means of an example drawn from the cognitive science literature. In what follows, we briefly summarize the example (from a study by Cole & Traupmann, 1981) to provide a basis for explicit discussion of proficiency and functional systems. Cole and Traupmann (1981), in their case study of inner-city elementary school children, discuss a student named Archie, labeled by his teachers as learning disabled, because, among other things, he manifested a reading problem. Cole and Traupmann, however, were unable to detect Archie's difficulty in the contextualized everyday world represented by an after-school cooking club they set up to observe how children solve everyday problems. Interestingly, on the basis of their observations of the club's activities, Cole and Traupmann concluded that Archie is one of the more competent members of the group. Cole and Traupmann were puzzled by the paradox of a child suffering a general deficit in a scholastic setting, while at the same time appearing to be completely normal in a natural setting like the cooking club. A closer look at Archie's behavior in the club setting, however, showed that the same deficits reported in the school environment were present in the natural context. The difference in the two contexts revealed a qualitatively different kind of environment-person interaction. In the cooking club, Archie was paired with another student, Ricky. In order to carry out one of the activities of the cooking club, the baking of a cake, it was necessary to follow the proper sequence of activities, the first of which was to read the recipe. This, of course, caused difficulties for Archie. Through a clever strategy of pretending to read the recipe, he managed to get Ricky, an excellent reader, to read the recipe. Ricky, on the other hand, was completely incapable of planning and adhering to the sequence of steps called for in the recipe. This turned out to be Archie's strong suit, and, as Cole and Traupmann remark, "Together, in strikingly complementary fashion, they get the job done" (Cole & Traupmann, 1981, p. 141). The researchers concluded that the children were active initiators and constructors of, rather than accommodators to, their environments. In other words, the children joined together to form a functional system, the goal of which was to bake a cake, which was achieved. Needless to say, Archie was less successful in controlling and shaping his scholastic environmentan environment designed to prevent overtly cooperative endeavors on the part of participants (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Cole and Traupmann, because they understand the sorts of claims we have been making, conclude that Archie's behavior is all but impossible to describe in terms of a closed system comprised of fixed attributes. This is because Archie, like all of us, operates not from fixed attributes, but from active shaping of his world to realize his goals. Above all, Archie is able to do this by working together with another individual. Thus, any claim that Archie suffers a deficit "turns out to be a statement about the structure of certain interactions he has with only some of the multiple environments he encounters" [italics added] (Cole & Traupmann, 1981, p. 147). This is a far more significant and revealing way of analyzing human behavior than assigning a person a number, which supposedly describes that individual's level of behavior. What all this means is that proficiency, linguistic or otherwise, is not a construct

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that can be formalized in terms of a taxonomy of items, no matter how long or genuine (see the Guidelines) that taxonomy may be. A very long or even exhaustive list of fixed attributes is still a list of fixed attributes. From the functional systems perspective, individuals do not select a set of forms from some internalized menu as a means to carry out an activity, because we are never sure how a particular may unfold, and because the organizational constraints on the participants in the tasks are, theoretically, infinitely variable. From the viewpoint of functional systems, so defined, coincidence or congruence of representational systems (i.e., linguistic menus) is, if not meaningless, seriously overrated.7 What matters in a functional linguistic system are the speakers as persons and the goals these persons establish for themselves in their activities. We cannot assume, therefore, that if students are successful in a decontextualized setting they will also be successful in a different setting. More importantly, we cannot assume that if they are unsuccessful in a setting such as the classroom testing situation, they will also fail in everyday settings. In fact, Higgs and Clifford (1982) warn that in interpreting ratings, we are obligated to reveal to our students the limitations of such judgments, lest we deceive them and ourselves. We must tell them not that they are competent to speak German, but that they are competent to meet routine physical and social obligations in an environment where German is spoken, (pp. 60-61) But this is only half the picture. In point of fact, on the basis of a rating, there is little justification for telling students that they are not competent to meet such obligations. The only environment we can be certain of is that established by the testing situation itself and nothing more. Otherwise, we are hard pressed to explain how entire sets of novice-lows do in fact manage to order meals and ask directions, something which their menu rating disallows.

DIRECTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

It is clear that the concept of proficiency, as construed by the Guidelines and as operationalized in the proficiency curriculum, is based on a homogenizing view of learning and human activity. In truth, it is not puzzling that it should be so, because proficiency itself is derived from policy and not from science or empirical inquiry: Policy never has much taste for persons, because its goal is homogenization (see Egan, 1983). This desire to achieve a degree of unity among second language learners has even led one prominent researcher to speak recently of the possibility of "creating a nation of 3s." The problem, however, is that unity is not created by policy, which attempts to make people the same. It arises normally when one person has an attribute that another does not. In such a state of affairs, there exists a real need for people to join together in order to realize their goals (as in the case of Archie and Ricky). In this regard, Ilyenkov (1977) cogently remarks, two absolutely equal individuals, each of which has the very same set of knowledge, habits, inclinations, etc., would be absolutely uninteresting to one another, and

Proficiency: Understanding the Construct the one would not need the other. They would simply bore each other to death. It is nothing but a simple doubling of solitariness, (p. 350)

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Our claim here is that to recognize equal access to education is also to recognize that people are simply different. This is what it means to be an individualin the real world, at least. It is this difference that stimulates people to interact with each other in order to get things done. The basis of unity and equality is diversity, not exactly what either measures of proficiency or of proficiency-based curricula strive for. Given the preceding discussion, we conclude that the one place where we cannot properly study what people do with or through language is the oral interview. The testing situation does not have privileged status. This is because in the laboratory setting or, in this case, the testing situation, there exists a hierarchical division of labor in which the establishment of goals and the means for attaining the goals (i.e., functional system) are not under the control of the individual, as they are in the real world, but are determined and manipulated by the researcher or tester (see Newmann, Griff en, &Cole, 1984, p. 91). 8 We hope that the position we have outlined in the preceding discussion will serve as a stimulus for serious, clinically based research into the nature of language proficiency, as called for by Duran (1984), for example. But to be of any value, this research must be guided by a kind of coherent theory of complex human behavior, such as that developed by Vygotsky and Luria. Without a sound theoretical perspective, any research program that seeks to investigate real speaking activity is doomed to result in little more than what Conant (1964) refers to as "stamp collecting," a kind of accountancy (p. 89). We should remark, in closing, that we are aware that some readers may respond to this paper with the typical "conversive dare": "Well, if you don't like proficiency, what do you propose we do? What does your system consist of?" We have two answers. First, simply to propose another system is not only counterproductive but question-begging: We think that because the proficiency testing and teaching enterprise is poorly conceived, further institutionalization of the Guidelines should be suspended for the time being. Second, we think that it is vitally important to find out true facts before deriving policy. We propose only to look for some true facts of proficiency. We believe that the search must begin with the dyadic relationship established between individuals via linguistic activity. The starting point is dyadically based proficiency, similar to Rommetveit's (1985, 1987) concept of dialogic intersubjectivity. Traditional approaches to dialogic interaction assume that "when interlocutors come together in a speech situation, they share a fund of 'background knowledge' that provides an agreed-upon foundation for communication" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 160). This assumption derives from the conduit metaphor of human communication in which a speaker is seen packaging information in boxes (called "words") and subsequently sending these packages across to some interlocutor who unwraps the boxes and extracts the messages (for further discussion, see Reddy, 1979). Rommetveit argues that the conduit metaphor forces researchers to focus on how each utterance in a dialogue simply adds to already established information and overlooks

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the crucial fact that communication "creates and transforms a situation" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 160). For Rommetveit, intersubjectivity is really an issue of how well humans are able to transcend their private worlds through linguistic means. What is negotiated is not meaning, but a dynamic social world that emerges from the coming together of two private worlds. Thus, at the outset of a dialogic exchange, the interlocutors may and usually do have vastly different perspectives, or, at best, a "vague interpretation of what is taken for granted and what the utterances are intended to convey" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 161). Out of this state of affairs, speakers attempt to negotiate a temporarily shared social world. Intersubjectivity is achieved between two communicating individuals if, and only if, some state of affairs is brought into focus by one of the participants and is jointly attended to by both of them (Rommetveit, 1985, 1987). In other words, "intersubjectivity exists between two interlocutors in a task setting when they share the same situation definition and know that they share the same situation definition" (Wertsch,

1984, P . 12).
Whether or not a state of intersubjectivity is actually attained rests upon the mutual endorsement of dyadic patterns of control in the dialogue (Rommetveit, 1985, p. 190). The question of control, therefore, becomes central to any discussion of linguistic interaction because it determines whose private world will or will not be endorsed. The control relationship between interlocutors can either be symmetrical or asymmetrical. The former case allows for unlimited interchangeability of dialogue roles (i.e., recognition of two private worlds), and the latter promotes the world view of one participant at the expense of the other. One speaker commits an act of symbolic violence against another speaker. The point of all this is that any endeavor to determine what it means to be a proficient speaker of a language must be linked to people seen as active creators of their world a world that is social and therefore a world not only of self but of others. This is the perspective that must be adopted if the true facts of proficiency are to be uncovered.

NOTES
1. Although these terms are explained fully in Lantolf and Frawley (1985a), we should perhaps define them briefly here for the sake of clarity. Criterion-reductive means "constituted wholly by the criteria themselves"; we argue that O P testing reduces kinds of linguistic behavior to constellations of criteria. Analytically derived means "non-empirically true"; we argue that O P testing criteria are derived from the model, not from experiment or experience. Norm-referenced means "based on norm," as it always has in testing; we argue that O P testing is implicitly norm-referenced, although claiming to be criterion-referenced. 2. In more practical terms, institutionalizing of O P testing may actually become a tool in the denial of equal access to education, because O P testing is a convenientand falseway of ranking groups of learners. 3. For example, height is metric, but colors on the spectrum are not, even though they can be arranged on a scale (Lewontin et al., 1984, p. 192). The question for O P testing is whether or not relevant linguistic behavior is metric or scalar. However, since the makers of the Guidelines expressly deny any concern for linguistic fact in the construction of the Guidelines"these guidelines are not based on a particular linguistic theory" ( A C T F L , 1986)we do not expect workers m O P even to have an opinion on this crucial matter. 4. This does not mean that psychometric findings are not interesting or even necessary, provided that they are, first of all, done, and second, done on a principled basis. 5. In fairness to workers in O P , we should note that they say that the Guidelines are not exhaustive.

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But this does not exclude the closed system, because each stage in proficiency should theoretically be exhaustively definite; if this is not possible, then the stages do not mean anything. 6. Velichkovskii (1987, pp. 2930) goes so far as to say that Vygotskyan theory is the only unified theory of cognitive processes. In this regard, he cites several American and European researchers, such as Johnson-Laird, Fodor, Neisser, Tulving, and Newell, among others, who present a pessimistic view of developments within cognitive science over the past hundred years. 7. The question of the importance of representational systems and their relation to functional systems requires some clarification here. By representational system we mean something along the lines of Universal Grammar, the mental representation of the grammar of a particular language, universal pragmaticsin short, competence, whether grammatical or communicative, both of which are idealized linguistic menus. The linguistic representational system, which has been studied for some years now, is actually a very small and well-circumscribed part of the entire human language system; it is also deterministic and automatic (see Fodor, 1983). Furthermore, if current theory is correct, the representational system is unlearned or "cognitively impenetrable," which means that it is also unteachable (Pylyshyn, 1985). Thus, any linguistic menu, such as the Guidelines, is irrelevant to teaching practice with regard to the acquisition of competence. The functional systemwhat Fodor (1983) calls "central processes"is another matter altogether. It is the nondeterministic, nonautomatic part of (linguistic) cognition; the extent of its effect on cognition is not known, though it is clear that it is less circumscribed than (linguistic) menus. In our view, it is the functional system that ought to be the concern of proficiency adherents, for many reasonsnot the least of which is that it can actually be taught. 8. For a full discussion of the importance of the role of the individual in determining the nature of the task m expenmentation, see Lantolf and Ahmed (1987).

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