Przegląd Zachodniopomorski

The content of the article is a methodological concept for the study of the level of foreign language competence as an element of human capital phenomena. The technique of studying the level of language competence is the result of several years of work on the issue of measuring the quality of human capital of large social communities. The proposed method of measuring language proficiency is located between the traditionally used research approaches: an indicator of the declared level of language competence and specialised language tests measuring skills, characteristic of school examinations. While the former approach is characterised by a high degree of subjectivity and cognitive relativism, the latter generates a number of logistical constraints (the number of participants, the number of questions and the duration of the survey), the methodology presented here, on the one hand, limits the impact of the subjective perception of the language competences possessed by the participants of the survey and, on the other hand, allows for the measurement to be carried out on large samples, which makes it possible to achieve the value of representativeness of the obtained results. The method is theoretically based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, on the basis of which language competence is measured in four sub-competences: understanding, speaking, reading-media, writing. Each of these areas contains a six-level scale indicating the level of the skills it comprises.