This guide communicates the increasing need in California for young people to develop skills in languages other than English, and to direct attention to assessing these skills in terms of language use competency in realistic situations rather than in terms of courses taken or units earned. The guide recognizes successive stages of competency and describes each stage in terms of the communicative tasks students should be able to perform. The study suggests that college freshmen should have attained, by the end of high school, the ability to listen, converse, read, and write in the target language with sufficient basic skill, vocabulary, accuracy, and cultural awareness to communicate needs in everyday situations in a culturally appropriate way. The report describes a continuum of competency consisting of four stages, giving specific competencies for comprehension (listening and reading), production (conversation and writing), cultural awareness, vocabulary control, and language accuracy at each stage. The competency level descriptions serve as guidelines for curriculum development in language programs and provide criteria for rating functional language ability. Appended materials include membership lists of the organizations responsible for developing the standards and an acknowledgement list. (Author/MSE)