English Language and Literature
What the exam expects
The English paper tests advanced grammar, translation and literary culture. Grammar: tense and aspect (present perfect versus simple past, past perfect for anteriority), modals and their degrees of certainty and obligation, conditionals (including mixed and inverted forms), passive and causative constructions, reported speech with backshift, articles and countability, prepositions, phrasal verbs, and word formation. Translation: thème (French into English) and version (English into French) demand idiomatic renderings, not word-for-word transfer. Literature: know the major periods (Elizabethan drama, Romanticism, Victorian novel, Modernism, postcolonial writing), and key authors such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Woolf, Conrad, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Buchi Emecheta.
Traps that recur
- Translating "depuis" mechanically as since when the English verb needs the present perfect ("I have lived here since 2010").
- Using simple past for a period continuing to now.
- Forgetting backshift in reported speech ("He said he was tired").
- Confusing make and do, say and tell, few and a few.
- Treating Things Fall Apart as a novel of celebration rather than of colonial disruption and internal collapse.
Rule of thumb
In translation, translate the function, not the word. Ask what the sentence does in its context, then render that function idiomatically in the target language.
Worked example
French: "Il pleut depuis trois jours." A literal "It rains since three days" fails twice. Correct: "It has been raining for three days" - present perfect continuous for an action continuing to the present, for for duration.