EIKEN Grade Pre-2 Plus study guide
EIKEN Grade Pre-2 Plus · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
EIKEN Grade Pre-2 Plus (英検準2級プラス) is a newer EIKEN grade placed between Grade 3 and Grade Pre-2. It is designed for learners who have outgrown basic everyday English but are not yet ready for the full Pre-2 workload: typically junior-high and early high-school students in Japan, and adult learners rebuilding their English. The EIKEN Grade Pre-2 Plus study guide has 5 sections and about 2,418 words.
01Reading Comprehension: Short Passages, Medium Passages, and Information Retrieval
Reading comprehension on EIKEN Grade Pre-2 tests two different skills inside one section: careful reading of short texts (短文) and medium-length passages (中文), and fast searching of practical texts in the 情報検索 task, where a flyer, timetable, notice, or email is printed and the questions ask for specific details. The language sits at a high-beginner to low-intermediate level, so the difficulty comes less from difficult vocabulary than from matching the exact wording of a question to the exact wording of the text.
508 words, about 3 min02Listening Comprehension: Dialogues, Announcements, and Longer Talks
The Pre-2 listening section asks you to understand short dialogues, announcements, and longer talks in natural but controlled English. Questions target the situation, the speaker's purpose, one specific detail (a time, a price, a place, an action), and what a listener is expected to do next.
472 words, about 2 min03Writing: Email/Message Response and Opinion-Based Essay
Pre-2 writing contains two productive tasks. The first is an email or message reply of about 40 English words to a short incoming message that asks you two questions.
493 words, about 2 min04Speaking: Read-Aloud, Passage Questions, Illustration Description, and Opinion Question
The Pre-2 interview has four parts: read a short passage aloud, answer questions about that passage, describe an illustration, and answer an opinion question with a reason. The examiner is checking pronunciation and fluency, comprehension, your ability to describe a scene accurately, and your ability to give and support a view in English without long silences.
462 words, about 2 min05Vocabulary, Grammar, and Usage in Context
This part tests words and grammar inside short contexts: a blank in a sentence (語句空所補充) with four choices, a blank in a short conversation where you pick the natural reply, and a word-ordering item (語句整序) where you arrange given words. The vocabulary level is roughly 3,000–4,000 basic words, so what separates candidates is not rare vocabulary but control of word class, collocation, tense, and fixed patterns.
483 words, about 2 min