Association of Language Testers in Europe

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The Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) is an association of language exam providers. The concept was formed in 1989 by the Universities of Cambridge and Salamanca and the following year, 1990, saw the holding of the first meeting of the association by eight founder members.

ALTE now establishes a six-level framework of language examination standards for twenty-four languages: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh.

The total number of first-language speakers of all these languages comes to 1.45 billion people, which represents around 22.5% of the world population.

The principal objectives of ALTE are:

to establish common levels of proficiency in order to promote the transnational recognition of certification in Europe.
to establish common standards for all stages of the language-testing process: that is, for test development, task and item writing, test administration, marking and grading, reporting of test results, test analysis and reporting of findings.
to collaborate on joint projects and in the exchange of ideas and know-how.

The following table compares the ALTE levels with the CEF levels and EFL exams:

ALTE level	CEFR level	ESOL exam	IELTS exam	TOEIC	TOEFL
Level 5	C2	CPE	7.5+	910+	276+
Level 4	C1	CAE	6.5 - 7	701 - 910	236 - 275
Level 3	B2	FCE	5 - 6	541 - 700	176 - 235
Level 2	B1	PET	3.5 - 4.5	381 - 540	126 - 175
Level 1	A2	KET	3	246 - 380	96 - 125
Breakthrough	A1	-	1-2	-	-