Level S-2: Limited Working Proficiency (Base Level)

Able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. Can handle routine work-related interactions that are limited in scope. In more complex and sophisticated work-related tasks, language usage generally disturbs the native speaker. Can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations, including extensive, but casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family, and autobiographical information. The S-2 can get the gist of most everyday conversations but has some difficulty understanding native speakers in situations that require specialized or sophisticated knowledge. The S-2's utterances are minimally cohesive. Linguistic structure is usually not very elaborate and not thoroughly controlled; errors are frequent. Vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances, but unusual or imprecise elsewhere.

Examples:  While these interactions will vary widely from individual to individual, an S-2 can typically ask and answer predictable questions in the workplace and give straightforward instructions to subordinates. Additionally, the S-2 can participate in personal and accommodation-type interactions with elaboration and facility; that is, can give and understand complicated, detailed and extensive directions and make non-routine changes in travel and accommodation arrangements. Simple structures and basic grammatical relations are typically controlled; however, there are areas of weakness in the commonly taught languages, these may be simple markings such as plurals, articles, linking words, and negatives or more complex structures such as tense/aspect usage, case morphology, passive constructions, word order, and embedding.