Students are expected to communicate with ease orally in everyday social and work situations, to be able to produce short, mainly informal, texts, e.g. letters, and to understand with ease more complicated texts on general subjects, even if they do not know the meaning of all the words and expressions.

The test deals with three skills: reading, writing and listening.

Reading

Candidates are expected to be able to understand texts of some complexity dealing with subjects of general interest, including public notices, signs and advertisements.

The comprehension of original texts is tested through multiple-choice questions. Candidates are expected to answer simple questions requiring short answers, matching, true/false and gap-filling.

Writing

Candidates are expected to be able to ask for and give information, describe events and situations and express opinions.

The test includes syntactical transformations of sentences without change of meaning, gap-filling in sentences and longer texts, a summary of a given text and the production of a text of 200 words (composition, letter, etc.) on one of two set subjects.

Listening

Candidates are expected to understand short dialogues, to be able to extract the general gist of the conversation as well as some salient and crucial details in a variety of topics of general interest. They should also be able to understand short continuous speeches such as news items, weather forecasts, recorded messages, public announcements and simple stories.