Assessing language proficiency is essential for education, as it enables instruction tailored to learners needs. This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatically classifying German texts according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) into different proficiency levels. To support robust training and evaluation, we construct a diverse dataset by combining multiple existing CEFR-annotated corpora with synthetic data. We then evaluate prompt-engineering strategies, fine-tuning of a LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct model and a probing-based approach that utilizes the internal neural state of the LLM for classification. Our results show a consistent performance improvement over prior methods, highlighting the potential of LLMs for reliable and scalable CEFR classification.
@article{arxiv.2512.06483,
title = {Classifying German Language Proficiency Levels Using Large Language Models},
author = {Elias-Leander Ahlers and Witold Brunsmann and Malte Schilling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.06483},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted at 3rd International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2025), Vienna (Austria)