TEF Canada expression écrite section A (fait divers): model answer

The TEF Canada writing section A gives you the opening of an article and asks you to write its continuation - usually twenty-five minutes and a floor of about eighty words, with no official maximum. Read the word “minimum” carefully: le français des affaires publishes a floor and never a ceiling, so any prep site quoting an upper limit invented it. That said, a well-controlled 120 words beats a padded 250.

The opening is almost always a fait divers - an accident, a fire, a theft, a rescue, a local event. You inherit a tone, a tense and a situation already set. Continuing is your job; starting over is not. And here is the mistake that costs the most: rephrasing the prompt. The marker has the opening in front of them, so any information you dress up again reads as filler. The figures below come from the TEF Canada expression écrite section page; reconfirm the timing on lefrancaisdesaffaires.fr, since exam logistics can change.

What are the four criteria for section A?

The test owner publishes them, and each line translates into a concrete writing move.

• Relevance - the information fits the subject. This penalises off-topic writing and padding.
• Quality of information - development, details, illustrations. This rewards the named detail: a place, a time, a witness, a consequence.
• Internal coherence and cohesion - the order of sentences, pronoun reference, and range of vocabulary.
• Spelling and punctuation - a criterion in its own right, scored, not merely tolerated.

A worked model answer

Opening: Mardi matin, peu avant sept heures, un camion de livraison a percuté un abribus sur le boulevard Saint-Laurent, à Montréal. Le conducteur a été légèrement blessé. A strong continuation:

Selon les premiers éléments recueillis par la police de Montréal, le véhicule aurait glissé sur une plaque de verglas avant de monter sur le trottoir. Trois personnes attendaient l’autobus à cet endroit ; deux d’entre elles, légèrement blessées, ont été transportées à l’hôpital Saint-Luc, d’où elles sont ressorties dans la matinée. « J’ai entendu un bruit sourd, puis j’ai vu l’abribus se plier comme du carton », raconte Sylvie Nadeau, qui tient le commerce d’en face. Le boulevard est resté fermé à la circulation jusqu’à midi, le temps de dégager les débris. La Ville a annoncé qu’un nouvel abribus serait installé la semaine prochaine. L’enquête devra établir si le camion roulait trop vite.

Every sentence adds something the opening did not contain: the probable cause, the number of casualties, the named hospital, the road closure, the city’s reaction. Notice le véhicule aurait glissé - the conditional is the journalistic mark of unconfirmed information, and a marker reads it as register control few candidates show.

What separates a strong continuation from filler?

Compare the model with what most candidates write, which hits the word count and adds nothing: C’est un accident très grave et très triste. Les gens qui attendaient l’autobus ont eu très peur... Il faut faire attention quand on conduit. Judgements replace facts, and it ends on a moral nobody asked for. The fix is a toolkit you can drill:

• Tenses. Passé composé for events, imparfait for the setting, plus-que-parfait for what came before, conditional for the unverified hypothesis.
• The passive. Les riverains ont été évacués lets you narrate without naming a culprit.
• Sources. Selon les premiers éléments de l’enquête, d’après un témoin, la porte-parole a précisé que.
• Reported speech. One direct quotation, attributed to a named person, beats three sentences of commentary.
• The close. End on what comes next - an inquiry, an expert report, an announced measure. Never on a moral.

How should I spend the twenty-five minutes?

Three minutes reading the opening twice and marking what it already says - which is now forbidden to you. Two minutes noting five new facts: cause, casualties, witness, immediate consequence, what follows. Fifteen minutes writing straight through without going back. Five minutes reading only for spelling and punctuation, because that is a full criterion: agreements, verb endings, capitals, closed quotation marks.

Does spelling really cost marks in section A?

Yes - and this is where the TEF differs from what many candidates expect. Spelling and punctuation is one of the four published criteria, a scored line in its own right, not something the marker generously overlooks. Your paper is read by two independent, trained correctors, and it reaches them anonymous: they see a candidate number and nothing else. That means the five-minute reread at the end is not cosmetic; it acts on a named criterion. Sweep it in filters rather than reading at random - verb endings and subject-verb agreement first, then past participles (with être, agree with the subject; with avoir, only with a preceding direct object), then the grammatical homophones (a and à, ou and où, on and ont), then capitals and closed quotation marks. Correcting an agreement needs no new French, only method, so these are the cheapest marks on the paper.

A single habit is worth more than the rest: before writing, list what the opening already tells the reader, then refuse to write any of it. Draft a few continuations under the clock, check the length with the word counter, and when you want to know what your section A score means for your file, the two-column TEF Canada score chart shows how writing lands on the scale IRCC actually reads.