Today I want to give those of you who are doing the DALF or DELF preparation course a bit of an insight into what you can expect. There is no substitute for the professional insight you will receive from your teachers at the EasyFrench School here in Montpellier but I thought by sharing my experience it might add a little bit of help. Even if it’s just to see how someone else is going about it as I find one of the most helpful things for me is talking to the other students about their takes on it. Like their strategies or little tips they have picked up to make the whole process a little bit easier, I often found you can create the best work habits by combining the best and brightest ideas from your classmates and melding them with your own. You’ve got to keep it right for you of course, we all learn differently.
This article will be dedicated to the oral production assignment. Now there are as many reactions to this section of the DALF preparation as there are students as the EasyFrench School in France. The oral production brings out all sorts of feelings in people as you can probably appreciate if you having been trying to speak a lot during your time learning French in France.
Writing can be tricky of course and there are some reading exercises that will look so alien to you they will make think that you need to go to the opticians but there is something a little more unsettling about hard oral productions. They involve public speaking for one which some people have a problem with when they are talking about a subject they are absolute experts on. Then you have to take into account the fact that you are almost definitely going to be making mistakes and mispronouncing things and then throw in the added time pressure that comes with speaking whilst learning French in France. There’s no time for looking up words in the dictionary or typing things in Linguee sadly. All these things conspire to create what can be quite a high pressure exercise but on the contrary it can be a lot of fun and when you find a secure level of expressing yourself and slowly kick out the borders of that well-trodden area it’s a fantastic feeling.
Structure Of the DALF French Exam
The DALF oral production is split into two parts; a monologue and a debate. You will be given some documents on a certain subject, normally two and the parts of the production will be based on the subject as a whole. Now don’t worry you don’t have to become an expert on every subject that could possibly come up in the exam, that’s impossible! The concept is to become proficient at expressing your ideas, elaborating on subjects with your own experience is a part of the grading system but you will be provided with all the information you will need for the topic. Of course, if you want to throw in some extra knowledge you have on an issue go ahead. The exposé or monologue is where the continual style of speech will come into play and will demand that you remember a well-structured speech without reading notes. Whereas, the debate will test your agility and flexibility with the language but you won’t have to keep quite so much information in your head.
A cool thing about the DALF oral presentation is that you have a choice of subjects; humanities or science. This allows you to better aim the discussion in an area you find interesting which normally has a positive impact on your work rate.
The key thing I feel after the first few looks at the exercises is learning the methodology and that is exactly what my teachers at the EasyFrench Language School in France have said to me as well. Learning the structure of the questions and the type of documents that are normally used for the questions allows you to learn to apply a process to the subject in question. This has made me more confident as it has completely taken out the anxiety of not knowing much about the subject in question. If you are considering doing the DALF I sincerely recommend taking the DALF preparation classes at the EasyFrench Language School in Montpellier as the teachers have such an in-depth knowledge of the format and have really got me excited to take the test.