Whereas the Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level Descriptions broke new ground for assessing proficiency in foreign languages, the need for user-oriented (rather than assessment-oriented) proficiency scales has led, especially in Europe, to the creation of scales consisting of positively formulated "can-do" statements, which describe sociolinguistic functions and are calibrated to the proficiency levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF or CEFR) and other European scales aligned with CEFR. To mitigate the washback effects of ILR-based proficiency assessment, which lead to an all but exclusive focus on threshold linguistic functions, this paper advocates banks of proficiency descriptors calibrated to the ILR base or plus level to which they belong. Such descriptor banks would provide explicit standards for foreign language acquisition in U.S. government agencies and programs and resolve many problems that arise in foreign language acquisition from defining general language proficiency exclusively in terms of threshold-level linguistic skills.