- Listening
- Four recordings — a conversation between two people in an everyday social context, a monologue in a social context, a conversation among up to four people in an educational or training context, and a monologue on an academic subject. Question types include multiple choice, matching, plan and map labelling, form and note completion, sentence completion and short answer. The recording is played once only, which makes following the speaker while writing a specific skill.
- Reading — Academic
- Three long passages from books, journals, magazines and newspapers, written for a non-specialist audience on topics of general interest. Question types include multiple choice, identifying information as true, false or not given, identifying the writer’s views, matching headings and features, sentence and summary completion, and diagram labelling.
- Reading — General Training
- Section 1 uses everyday texts such as advertisements and notices; Section 2 uses workplace texts such as contracts and staff development material; Section 3 uses a longer text of general interest. The question types are the same as in the Academic module.
- Writing — Academic
- Task 1 requires summarising, describing or explaining a graph, table, chart or diagram in at least 150 words. Task 2 requires an essay of at least 250 words responding to a point of view, argument or problem. Both are assessed on task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy.
- Writing — General Training
- Task 1 requires a letter — formal, semi-formal or personal — of at least 150 words responding to a given situation. Task 2 requires an essay of at least 250 words, generally more personal in style than the Academic equivalent.
- Speaking
- Part 1 covers familiar topics such as home, family, work and studies. Part 2 gives a topic card and one minute to prepare a one-to-two-minute talk. Part 3 develops the Part 2 theme through discussion. Assessed on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.
The four assessment criteria for writing and speaking are published, and reading them carefully is more useful than most preparation advice. They tell you exactly what the examiner is looking for — task achievement, coherence, lexical range and grammatical accuracy — and a candidate who writes and speaks with those criteria in mind improves faster than one working from general impressions of "good English".
