English Language Proficiency
What the paper tests
The English paper measures usable control of English, not literary criticism: concord, tense and aspect, conditionals, prepositions, phrasal verbs, synonym and antonym choice, error identification, plus a comprehension passage, a summary and an essay. Marks are lost on small structural slips far more often than on limited vocabulary.
Rules that are actually tested
- Concord: The number of candidates is rising but A number of candidates are absent. With either…or / neither…nor the verb agrees with the nearer subject: Neither the teacher nor the students were informed.
- Negative adverbials trigger inversion: Hardly had he sat down when the bell rang; No sooner had she spoken than the room fell silent; Not only did he apologise, but he also paid.
- Subjunctive after demand, insist, suggest, propose: The board insisted that he resign.
- It is high time + past simple: It is high time we left.
- Third conditional: If she had studied, she would have passed - never "would have" inside the if-clause.
- Prepositions: comprise (no "of"), discuss (no "about"), married to, different from, capable of, composed of.
Worked example
Complete: "No sooner ______ (the bell ring) than the candidates ______ (start) writing." Step 1: No sooner is a negative adverbial, so the clause that follows inverts subject and auxiliary. Step 2: the earlier of the two events takes the past perfect, giving had the bell rung. Step 3: than introduces the later event in the simple past - started. Full answer: No sooner had the bell rung than the candidates started writing. A script writing "No sooner the bell rang than…" loses both the inversion mark and the sequence-of-tenses mark.
Traps
- Summary tasks: copying sentences verbatim or overshooting the word limit. Re-express ideas in your own words and count the words.
- Essay: contractions (don't, it's), rhetorical questions and chatty openings ("In this world of today…"). Use a clear thesis, two or three developed paragraphs and a conclusion that answers the question.
- Confusable pairs: affect/effect, principal/principle, practice/practise, advice/advise.
- Translating French structures word for word: "I have 20 years" instead of "I am 20 years old"; "assist at a ceremony" instead of "attend a ceremony".
Working method
Underline the time marker before choosing a tense; read the whole sentence before correcting concord; keep a personal list of prepositional collocations drawn from your own errors.