By: Dr. Brandee Mau, VP of Learning Services, Avant Assessment
The floor of my first apartment, surrounded by textbook materials, and no real idea what to do with them – the picture of an overwhelming start to my teaching career. With six different levels to teach and a directive to just do what I think was best, I was stepping foot into the wild west of language teaching. To help you picture it, the national standards were brand new. Proficiency wasn’t yet a working concept like it is now, and nobody taught me how language actually develops in a learner. I was, as a veteran colleague so accurately observed, ‘shooting from the hip’ every lesson.
Which, given that I was teaching in Wyoming, was at least fitting.
Two months into that first year, I attended a workshop on proficiency. That sparked a curiosity that shaped my entire career: What does proficiency mean in a learners’ reality and what really contributes to language growth?
A Career-Long Puzzle
For nearly thirty years now, I have pursued solutions to the same curiosity: why do so many language learners struggle to move through intermediate proficiency levels?
My career has spanned the dawn of the internet, accessibility of authentic digital language resources, the power of proficiency, and now the emergence of AI — each a new frontier in what has always felt like a new chapter in the wild west saga of language education. New solutions have sparked the same hope: *this* will help learners break through.
And yet…
Two ten-year longitudinal reports based on Avant STAMP assessment data tell the same story: in spite of our very best efforts, most language learners plateau at the early intermediate range. It is especially startling when we consider the attrition from Level 1 to Level 4. The Seal of Biliteracy initiative has helped but we are still losing so many learners on that journey.
The education field’s widely accepted answer has long been: language learning just takes time. The intermediate plateau is natural. Expected, even.
I have never been able to accept that answer. I think answers that placate me about my efforts are often the ones most worth questioning. What if we have been asking the wrong questions? What are we missing?
The Classroom Mix That Changed Everything
The first crack in that prevailing theory came not from research, but from desperation.
About nine years into my career, I had a Level 2 German class with students ranging from solid emerging-intermediate to no German whatsoever. I also had 42+ students per class, six preps, and two buildings. The feedback and grading model I had laboriously developed and struggled to maintain became irrevocably unsustainable.
So I stripped everything down to what actually mattered. I looked at the end assessments, asking: what language did learners actually need to produce?, and mapped that to where each student was at that moment. I gave them two or three bite-sized, specific language lens targets: sentence variety, specific language structures, things they could self-monitor and peer-edit. Then I had students set their own SMART goals for the unit, reflect at the end on their progress, and decide what their next goal should be.
By the end of that year, students who had entered with no German at all were consistently producing language at the intermediate-low level.
I didn’t fully understand why it worked at the time.Something had shifted for those learners that direct instruction hadn’t been able to open.
Now, I can name it: agency. When students had to see the gap, name their own next step, and reflect on their own progress — when I got out of the way and made room for them to do the meaning-making — they moved.
The intermediate stall wasn’t inevitable. It was a design problem.
Widening the Triangle
The picture kept sharpening over the years. A particularly poignant experience took place over 9 hot summer days in Iowa. What we practiced, metacognitive meddling, was structured dissonance — placing our own perspective next to another perspective on the same thing, not to replace our view but to hold both at once. Dr. Cherice Montgomery used a triangle as a framework for the process. To experience a bit yourself: put your hands up in front of your face, fingers forming a triangle frame like we do with circled fingers to mimic binoculars.
That triangle is your Heart: your immediate experience, your lived reality, the world as you have always known it. It is not a small or unimportant space. But it is a limited one, and the most disorienting thing about it is that you often cannot tell it is limited from the inside.
And when you engage in structured dissonance – the practice of examining something through multilingual, multimodal, mutlicultural, and multiliterate lens, the triangle expands. A Hoop opens. The more Hoops you can hold, the more it becomes possible to look toward a Horizon — the not-yet-seen, the could-be’s, the futures that don’t exist yet. The Heart, Hoop, Horizon – 3Hs, as I call them, shift the ‘plateau’ we think is there to a steady progession with meaningful work.
I had been watching this same thing happen in language classrooms for years without having the words for it. Early in my career, I had German students compare their own town to what a German teenager might know — their communties and assumptions next to someone else’s. I had them think about a day as a Wyoming tourist compared to a day as a German tourist. Not translation. Not code-swapping. Real, three-dimensional meaning-making. That first Hoop opened something that grammar drills never had.
Later, working with College Board on AP German Language and Culture(R) exam revisions, I helped build this principle into an assessment structure: paired multimodal stimuli, intentionally chosen to approach the same topic from different angles. For example, urban growth and habitat loss as an abstract policy issue, placed next to a visual showing how feeding ducks damages a local ecosystem (ducks aren’t meant to eat bread and large amounts of bread suffocate natural foodchains). Two sources that required learners to hold complexity — not just comprehend it, but think *with* it.
Same principle. Same wall broken by the same mechanism. Every time.
Listening to the Data
For nearly a decade in Dual Language Immersion work in Utah, I developed a classroom observation tool I called the *Who’s Talking Protocol*. This is a way to track not just who was speaking, but what kind of talking is happening and what quality of language is being produced.
The data was not flattering. Most teachers talked too much. Most student participation was performative with choral responses, single call-outs, turn-and-talks that had the shape of language use but not the substance. Students spent the majority of their time in the Heart, occasionally escorted somewhere richer, then brought back. Nobody was asking them to do their own meaning-making.
This wasn’t about bad teaching. These were dedicated, skilled educators. But without a lens that made the problem visible, they couldn’t see what was happening. The intermediate plateau wasn’t a wide wandering vista to traverse, but rather a climbable, scalable landscape. It was right there in the data.
What I still couldn’t do was name the full architecture of what was missing — and why.
When an Idea becomes reality
That’s where Dr. Liza Trejo came in.
I have known Liza for a long time, and I hired her onto my team during a time when our customers — mostly Dual Language Immersion programs — were asking for Science of Reading support. We started looking together at Scarborough’s Rope, the research model that maps the components of skilled reading. What we kept seeing was the same gap: Science of Reading instruction concentrates heavily on the decoding strand:phonics, morphology, and the mechanics of print. The language comprehension strand, the meaning-making side, gets far less attention. And for multilingual learners especially, that is where learners disappear.
Liza had spent her career in that gap. Her doctoral work examined how international teachers functioned in U.S. immersion contexts and what literacy — not just reading, but the full architecture of communication and meaning-making — actually looked like when you were operating across languages, cultures, and culturally informed systems.
Her half and my half had been converging for years without either of us knowing it.
Then one day she said: *I’ve been working on something. I’m calling it the Proficiency First Multiliteracies framework.*
I want to be precise about what happened in that moment, because the word *named* doesn’t capture it. Liza didn’t label something that already had a shape. She spoke it into being. When she said those words, something that had been living in both of us — separately, incompletely, in different forms — became real, possible, and whole.
Everything clicked.
What is Proficiency First Multiliteracies (PFM)?
Proficiency First Multiliteracies is a framework co-developed by Liza Trejo and me. It is the intersection of our two bodies of life work: her expertise in literacy as the full architecture of communication and meaning-making, and my work in proficiency development, the plateau, assessment, and the role of agency in learning.
The core claim is this: language proficiency is not separate from learning. It is the engine that makes learning possible. And the “intermediate plateau” exists not because learning is slow, but because early language instruction treats language as two-dimensional — a code swap between languages — when it is actually a three-dimensional (3D) meaning-making system that demands agency.
The traditional 2D approach works at the novice level. But to break through intermediate, learners have to begin operating in the Hoop and toward the Horizon.They have to hold their own reality and another simultaneously, until concepts become three-dimensional. Then, reaching toward what doesn’t yet exist: the space where genuine critical thinking, creativity, and agency flourish.
That is where real language is required. And that is what PFM is designed to develop.
The multilingual, multimodal, mutlicultural, and multiliterate dimensions of PFM — the *multis* — are not descriptors of scope. They are the mechanism. They are the invitation into the Hoop. Engaging across languages, modes, and literacies is what first reveals to learners that their own Heart is not the whole world.
And agency is structural, not optional. If the teacher never steps out of the way, the learner stays in the Heart. The learner must develop the capacity to scoop their own Hoop and cast their own Horizon. That is a precondition for advancement.
The plateau is not inevitable.
It is a design problem. And we are building the framework to fix it.
In the next post, I’ll go deeper into the conceptual engine at the heart of PFM: Heart, Hoop, and Horizon — what they mean, where they came from, and what they look like in a real classroom.
Dr. Brandee Mau is VP of Learning Services at Avant Language and co-developer of the Proficiency First Multiliteracies framework.
