TCF Canada expression écrite tâche 1: a worked model answer

The TCF Canada writing task 1 is the shortest thing you will write all exam, and it is where confident French speakers most often give away an easy band. The task is a message that has to do a job - describe, recount or explain something to a named recipient - in a word range of roughly 60 to 120 words. Aim for the upper middle, around 100 words, and never for the boundary, because nobody publishes what counts as a word and you do not want your mark riding on that.

Here is the thing the exam board will not tell you: the task is not the theme, it is the situation. The instruction always states who you are, who you are writing to, why, and in what form. Answer the theme instead of the situation and you have written something off-task, however good the French. Everything below is grounded in the TCF Canada expression écrite section page; treat the exact word range and the 60-minute total as facts to reconfirm on france-education-international.fr before your sitting, since exam logistics change.

What is TCF Canada tâche 1 actually asking for?

A message with four moves, and you have the room for all four. The recipient’s status is not decoration - it is the hook for the sociolinguistic criterion, the single easiest mark to earn if you decide on tu or vous before you write the first word.

• Situate. Why you are writing, about what, and when - in the first sentence.
• Recount or describe. The facts, in order, with one concrete detail rather than an adjective.
• Explain or justify. Why it matters to the reader.
• Ask and close. What you want the recipient to do, plus a sign-off that matches the opening.

The first move decides everything. A weak opening announces that it is about to speak; a strong one is already speaking.

A worked model answer (with the prompt)

Prompt: you spent three nights at an inn in Québec. Back home, you write to the manager to describe your stay, report a problem in your room, and say what you expect. Here is a model at ninety-four words, sign-off aside.

Monsieur, j’ai séjourné dans votre auberge du 12 au 15 mars, chambre 204, et je tenais à vous écrire à mon retour. L’accueil a été chaleureux et votre équipe de réception m’a beaucoup aidé à organiser mes visites. Un point a cependant gâché ce séjour : le chauffage de la chambre est resté bloqué sur la position maximale pendant les trois nuits. J’ai signalé le problème deux fois, sans résultat. Je ne réclame pas un remboursement complet, mais un geste commercial me paraîtrait justifié. Je vous serais reconnaissant de me dire ce que vous pouvez proposer. Cordialement, Marie Lambert

Read what that model refuses to do. It does not say the heating was “very hot” and the stay “not good”. A weak version reads: Le chauffage était très chaud. Ce n’était pas bien. J’ai dit au personnel mais rien. The strong version turns each vague impression into a verifiable fact - bloqué sur la position maximale, the duration named, sans résultat instead of mais rien. None of those upgrades is grammatical, and all of them are visible on first reading. That is exactly the axis the marker rewards.

How is tâche 1 marked?

France Éducation international publishes three orders of criteria and no band descriptors: linguistic (lexical range, grammar, spelling, sentence elaboration), pragmatic (coherence and thematic development), and sociolinguistic (fit to the communicative situation). Any detailed TCF marking grid you find online is unsourced. Two markers score each task independently and double-blind, and each assigns one CEFR level, not a running error count. So removing four agreement mistakes buys you no level; a wider lexicon and a clear structure do.

The number to aim at is NCLC 7, which is 10 or 11 out of 20 on writing and lines up with B2. B2 does not mean an error-free text. It means a text nothing blocks, that builds something.

What are the most common tâche 1 mistakes?

• Writing to the theme, not the person. A general essay on noise pollution when the task was a specific complaint to the building manager is off-task with no recipient and no objective.
• No clear request. A message that ends without asking the reader to do something has done half its job.
• Register drift. One stray tu in a formal message, or a familiar sign-off under a formal opening, is spotted instantly.
• Hugging the word boundary. Land near the middle of the range so a debatable word count cannot sink you.

How long should tâche 1 take?

France Éducation international publishes one duration only - 60 minutes for all three tasks - and no official per-task split, so any source telling you tâche 1 “must” take fifteen minutes is offering a study strategy, not an exam rule. A workable budget is around twelve minutes here, including two to plan and two to count, which leaves the bulk of the hour for tasks 2 and 3. The reason to keep task 1 short is blunt: an unfinished task is a published condition for “A1 non atteint” on the whole script, so a tidy, finished 100-word message is worth far more than a beautiful one you never closed. Plan on the rough sheet in single words, never full sentences, because a text written out in full on the brouillon is not the text that gets marked.

Before exam day, draft a handful of these under the clock and check the length with the word counter, then read only your first and last line to confirm the register holds. If you want your drafts marked against the real criteria rather than a self-check, that is the whole point of the TCF Canada course: free practice has no answer key for what you produce.