As world language educators, we owe it to our students to seek new ideas, tools, and strategies so that we may be the best teachers we know how to be.

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Let's meet Malou and Lan, students of mine in an intermediate-high ESL conversation class. Their spoken English proficiency (spontaneous, unrehearsed abilities) seems to be coming along quite well. Let's take a quick listen:

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I built this website, named ProficiencyBuilder (clever, right?), for one reason: to help ensure that all students like Malou and Lan develop a foundation of language readiness for whatever is next in their futures. I understand this is a bit utopian, but this is the goal. Despite the downsides of this website, it is a professional development resource, aiming to guide educators toward seamlessly (and, no, it probably won't be) - and successfully - implementing a competency-based model of language teaching into their face-to-face language course or program.

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