Madrid PAU English - Additional Foreign Language study guide
Madrid PAU English - Additional Foreign Language · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Madrid PAU (EvAU) English paper as an additional foreign language is the second-language option taken by candidates in the Comunidad de Madrid who present English alongside the compulsory foreign language. It is a university-access examination, not a certificate: the mark contributes to the admission score used for degree places, and it is scored by the examining board rather than by any external awarding body. The Madrid PAU English - Additional Foreign Language study guide has 4 sections and about 1,894 words.
01Reading comprehension - global understanding of a written text
The English paper of the Madrid PAU (Lengua Extranjera: Inglés, fase voluntaria) opens with a text of roughly 400–450 words followed by comprehension tasks. Global-understanding items - main idea, purpose, attitude, best title or summary - are the ones candidates most often answer from their general knowledge of the topic instead of from the text.
472 words, about 2 min02Reading comprehension - specific information and inference
The second band of comprehension items asks for facts located in the text (names, dates, figures, reasons) and for inferences: conclusions the text supports without stating them. In the Madrid model this is where true/false-with-justification and short-answer questions appear.
470 words, about 2 min03Lexical and grammatical competence (use of English)
This part rewards control rather than ambition. Typical tasks are sentence transformation («rewrite so that the meaning stays the same», often with a given opening or word), gap-fill or cloze, word formation and synonym matching.
494 words, about 2 min04Written production - guided composition (coherence, cohesion, accuracy, range)
You choose one of two tasks and write 120–150 words. The marking criteria combine task achievement (every point of the prompt covered), coherence (paragraphing and logical order), cohesion (linkers used correctly), range (variety of structures and vocabulary) and accuracy.
458 words, about 2 min