Tu or vous? Getting register right in the TCF/TEF Canada

People searching for a TCF Canada writing template are usually looking for the wrong safety net. A template cannot fix the thing that most often caps a writing or speaking score, which is register: the choice between tu and vous, and everything that choice drags along with it. Register mistakes are quiet. They do not stop a reader understanding you, so you never feel them happen, and they cost more than almost any grammar error because they colour a whole answer rather than a single word.

The good news is that register is the easiest criterion in the exam to satisfy, on one condition: that you decide it before you write, not while you write. The instruction always tells you who your reader is. That is the exam handing you the answer.

How do you know whether to use tu or vous?

You read the reader's status off the instruction, which never leaves it to chance. If the task names a friend, a sibling or a close colleague, the exam expects tu. If it names a manager, a landlord, a company, an official, a newspaper or anyone you do not know, it expects vous. When in genuine doubt, vous is the safer default, because using vous with someone you could have addressed as tu reads as polite, while the reverse reads as a social error.

The mistake to name is not choosing wrong once. It is choosing and then drifting. A letter that opens with vous and lets one tu slip into the middle is worse than one that picks tu and holds it, because the drift tells a marker the register was never a decision.

Why does register cost more than grammar?

Because of footprint. A wrong agreement damages one word; a wrong register damages the whole task. On the TCF, the marker assigns a single CEFR level to each task, and appropriateness to the communicative situation is one of the three orders of criteria the exam board names. Tutoyer a director, sign a friendly note with a formal closing, or write to a newspaper the way you would text your sister, and the fault does not sit in one place. It sits over the entire answer. That is why, ranked by cost, sociolinguistic errors come first, above both the plan and the grammar.

What has to match, beyond the pronoun?

Register is not only tu versus vous. Once you have chosen, the greeting, the requests, the complaints and the sign-off all have to belong to the same world. A single lapse at either end gives the choice away.

Notice that the opening and the closing have to belong together: Bonjour Karim ends with À bientôt, and Madame, Monsieur ends with a full formal closing. A checklist of one line covers it: reread only the first and last sentence of each text and confirm they are in the same register.

What does a register slip look like in practice?

It is rarely dramatic, which is exactly why it survives to the marker. Take a message to a hotel manager about a problem during your stay. A candidate who has chosen vous writes a clean, formal complaint, and then, warming up near the end, adds et franchement, c'était pas cool (and honestly, it wasn't cool). One sentence, understood perfectly, and it drops the whole letter a register. The reader is no longer a manager; for a moment they are a friend, and the marker records that the writer could not sustain a social role.

The same slip runs the other way. A note to a close friend that opens Salut and then closes with Je vous prie d'agréer mes salutations distinguées is not safely formal; it is inconsistent, and inconsistency is the fault. The lesson is that register is not a dial you can nudge toward politeness to be safe. It is a single choice you make once and then protect, especially at the two ends of the text where greetings and sign-offs live.

Does the TEF need register too?

Yes, but read the instruction rather than assuming. On the TEF expression écrite, Section B asks you to take a position and justify it, and the exam board states that formal letter layout is not required, so you spend nothing on headers or addresses. What still matters is that the voice fits an argued, public piece: you are reasoning for a reader, not chatting. Section A, the news-item continuation, wants a neutral journalistic register, which is a third setting again, neither intimate nor a personal complaint. The principle is constant across both exams even as the tasks change: the form the instruction names decides the register, and the register decides your vocabulary and your closings.

How do you stop register slips?

Decide first, and check last. Before writing, note the reader's status on the rough sheet next to who-to-whom-why-what-form; that single word, tu or vous, governs everything after it. Then spend one of your final minutes on register alone, reading only the openings and closings rather than the middle, because that is where a lapse hides. The same discipline carries into the expression orale, where the examiner's role in the task tells you which pronoun to use and holding it under the pressure of speaking is harder than on paper. If you want to know whether your register actually held across a whole answer, that is one of the clearest things a marker can confirm for you in the TCF Canada course, and one of the hardest to judge from rereading your own work.