The Reading paper assesses candidates’ ability to read and understand texts taken from fiction and non-fiction books, journals, newspapers and magazines. Candidates are expected to be able to show understanding of gist, detail and text structure, and deduce meaning.

The Writing paper assesses candidates’ ability to write non-specialised text types such as letters, articles, reports, compositions and reviews of 120-180 words covering a range of topics and target readers and also set texts.

In the Use of English paper, candidates are expected to demonstrate their knowledge and control of the language system by completing various tasks at text and sentence level. These include filling gaps, transforming words and phrases, and identifying errors in texts.

The Listening paper assesses candidates’ ability to understand the meaning of spoken English, and to extract gist and meaning from spoken text. The texts are taken from a variety of text types including interviews, discussions, lectures and conversations.

The Speaking Test assesses candidates’ ability to interact in conversational English in a range of contexts. It contains four parts, including an interview section, individual long turns of about one minute, a collaborative task and a discussion. Candidates are provided with stimulus material such as photographs and drawings.
Candidates normally take the Speaking Test in pairs.