Title Twenty Years, Two Instruments, One Plateau: Convergent Evidence on Corporate English Proficiency in Latin America (2001–2023)

Two independent corporate assessment datasets, accumulated under different instruments, programmatic contexts, and time periods, converge on a single empirical finding: approximately 54% of Latin American corporate professionals assessed for English proficiency cluster in the B1–B2 intermediate band, with fewer than 10% reaching C1–C2 Advanced proficiency. The first dataset comprises 2,488 deduplicated records from the ELSA instrument of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry Examinations Board (LCCIEB), accumulated through corporate language sponsorship programs in Brazil and Latin America (2001–2008). The second comprises 549 deduplicated records from the iTEP Business-Plus instrument, accumulated through executive recruitment and selection assessments in Brazil and Mexico (2015–2023). Together, the datasets span 3,037 candidate records and more than two decades of practitioner-held corporate assessment. The convergence of intermediate plateau proportions — 54.5% (ELSA) and 53.6% (iTEP) — across two instruments and two fundamentally different organizational contexts suggests that the intermediate plateau is a structural feature of adult professional language acquisition in this region, not an artifact of any particular assessment tool, program design, or organizational sector.