Basque PAU French common mistakes
Basque PAU French · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Answering comprehension questions with a personal opinion or general knowledge instead of locating the information in the text, e.g. writing "je pense que le télétravail est bien" when the question asks what the author says about it.
Candidates transfer habits from essay writing and from oral debate, and under time pressure they answer from intuition rather than re-reading the passage; the Basque PAU text often deals with familiar social topics (work, ecology, screens) that invite opinion.
What to do instead
For every question, underline the exact sentence in the text that supports the answer and quote or paraphrase only that. Train with the rule: no line in the text, no point in the answer. If the question says "selon l'auteur" or "d'après le document", explicitly avoid first-person opinion markers.
Confusing the question type: giving a yes/no personal stance when asked to explain a cause, or summarising the whole text when asked for one precise detail.
Question stems in the PAU mix formulations such as "Pourquoi...?", "Expliquez...", "Relevez...", "Que pense l'auteur de...?" and candidates skim the verb without identifying the expected answer type.
What to do instead
Before writing, label each question in the margin: cause, definition, quotation, author's stance, inference. Practise a bank of stem types and match each to a required answer format (a clause with "parce que", a short definition, an exact quote with quotation marks, a reformulation).
Copying long chunks of the text verbatim as the answer to a comprehension question.
Fear of making grammar errors pushes candidates to copy; they believe a correct quotation cannot be penalised, but examiners require reformulation to prove understanding.
What to do instead
Use the copy-reformulate routine: copy the supporting sentence, then rewrite it changing structure (nominalisation, synonym, passive/active switch, pronoun substitution) and keep at most a short quoted fragment. Practise reformulating ten sentences per session with a synonym dictionary.
Mixing up verb tenses in written production, especially passé composé versus imparfait in narration and futur simple versus conditionnel in hypotheses.
Basque and Spanish speakers often map tense use from their L1, and French spelling hides many endings ("-ais/-ait/-aient" sound identical), so the error is invisible to the ear.
What to do instead
Learn tense choice through function, not translation: imparfait for description/habit, passé composé for bounded events, conditionnel after "si + imparfait". Do targeted transformation drills (ten sentences from present to past, ten hypotheses) and proofread specifically for endings -ais/-ait/-aient versus -ai/-é.
Producing anglicisms and L1 calques in vocabulary and collocations, e.g. "*réaliser" for "se rendre compte", "*actuellement" for "actually", "*assister à une réunion" misused, or Basque/Spanish calques like "*prendre une décision de" instead of "décider de".
Candidates read English and use Spanish/Basque as their main reference language, and false friends are reinforced by cognate similarity; school vocabulary lists rarely cover collocations.
What to do instead
Keep a personal false-friend and collocation log with the correct French chunk in a full sentence. Study vocabulary in collocations ("prendre une décision", "jouer un rôle", "poser une question") rather than isolated words, and revise the log before each mock exam.
Ignoring agreement chains: adjective and past-participle agreement, especially with avoir and preceding direct object, and plural marking on nouns and adjectives.
Agreement is inaudible in most French forms, so candidates rely on sound; with avoir the participle agrees only with a preceding direct object, a rule that has no equivalent in Basque and is often weakly taught in Spanish.
What to do instead
Adopt a mechanical final check: circle every noun, link its determiners and adjectives, then check every past participle by asking what its direct object is and where it sits. Do five-minute agreement-only proofreading exercises on your own drafts.
Writing an essay or formal letter with no clear plan, producing a single block of text with no introduction, development, or conclusion, and drifting off the prompt.
Time pressure in the PAU leaves 25-30 minutes for production, and candidates start writing immediately, so ideas arrive unordered and the required genre conventions are forgotten.
What to do instead
Spend five minutes on a skeleton: thesis, two arguments with one example each, conclusion, plus the genre's fixed elements (greeting, closing formula for a letter; connectors for an essay). Write to the plan and check at the end that every paragraph serves the prompt.
Using the wrong register: tutoiement in a formal letter, slang or spoken fillers ("du coup", "genre", "truc") in an essay, or "vous" mixed with informal vocabulary.
Candidates imitate the informal French of series, social media, and peer speech, and the PAU prompt does not always make the required register explicit, so the default becomes oral style.
What to do instead
Memorise two register kits: formal ("Madame, Monsieur", "je vous prie d'agréer", "il convient de", "en effet") and neutral-argumentative ("premièrement", "or", "par conséquent"). Before writing, identify the addressee and genre and choose the kit; ban oral fillers from all written work.
Describing the French-speaking world only through Parisian clichés (the Eiffel Tower, cafés, wine, berets) or through stereotypes about regions and overseas territories.
Textbooks and tourism imagery supply a narrow, iconic repertoire, and candidates lack knowledge of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and the French overseas departments, so they fall back on stock images.
What to do instead
Build a fact sheet per francophone area: one writer, one musician or film, one institution, one linguistic feature (e.g. Quebec's Office québécois de la langue française, Belgian and Swiss lexical differences, la Francophonie and its institutions). Use these concrete references instead of clichés in cultural questions and essays.
Using connectors incorrectly or not at all, so the argument reads as a list: "aussi" placed at the start of a clause meaning "also", "donc" and "alors" overused, "par contre" used in formal writing, or no logical link between paragraphs.
Connectors are learned as vocabulary items with a single translation, not as logical operators with constraints on position and register; Basque and Spanish sentence rhythm also differs from French connective placement.
What to do instead
Learn connectors by logical function (addition, contrast, cause, consequence, concession, illustration) with one formal and one neutral option each, plus their position rules. Practise rewriting a paragraph so each sentence is linked, then check that every connector expresses the intended logic.