"standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected"

A long, in-depth, and very interesting article on how the U.S. military approaches language training, especially for elite troops who might go into areas where a base-level of language and cultural skills are a must:

"A Green Beret trained in Modern Standard Arabic and deployed to Iraq isn’t going to have many fluent conversations with his counterparts who speak an Iraqi dialect. But he can exchange simple pleasantries, ask about his counterpart’s family, and understand basic military terminology — all while getting a laugh out his new Iraqi friends who might describe his school-taught Modern Standard dialect as 'fancy Arabic.'

Once it’s accepted that in most cases the purpose of language training isn’t to achieve fluency, it allows standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected from today’s Green Berets. The Interagency Language Roundtable scoring scale notes that at a 1+ rating, speakers '[c]an initiate and maintain predictable face-to-face conversations and satisfy limited social demands.' Meanwhile, listeners demonstrate '[s]ufficient comprehension to understand short conversations about all survival needs and limited social demands.' This level of speaking and listening is more than enough for Green Berets to converse with a partner force that speaks the same language, get across basic ideas, and potentially work around a situation where an interpreter or English-speaking member of the partner force isn’t available."

There's a lot more going on in the article that's worth looking at.

I also appreciate an educational model where perfection isn't the goal, but basic communication is.  Maybe it's the military's version of "ELF," or "English as Lingua Franca."