Valencian Community PAU Foreign Language II - English (Lengua Extranjera II: Inglés)

It tests whether you can understand an authentic English text and respond to it accurately, then produce your own written English at an upper-intermediate level. Expect comprehension items, contextual vocabulary and grammar, and a guided composition. It is a proficiency test, not a literature or culture test, so wider reading in English helps more than memorising rules.

Those figures are set officially each year and are not fixed here. The current structure, duration and scoring are published by the Conselleria d'Educació and by the universities that administer the PAU. Check their official pages before you plan your timing practice, and build your mock exams around the format in force for your sitting.

The pass mark and the weighting of the English paper within your overall university access score are determined officially and can vary by year and by degree. Do not rely on second-hand figures. Consult the official PAU documentation for the Valencian Community or your target university's admissions office for the current rules.

Retake arrangements are governed by official regulations, and the specific rules on extra sittings and which result counts are published by the administering body. Because these change, verify the current policy on the Conselleria or university website rather than assuming a fixed number of attempts. Your school's guidance department can also confirm the procedure for your situation.

The reading and writing demands sit around B2 on the Common European Framework, but the tasks are different from a Cambridge or Trinity exam: there is no listening or speaking, and answers must be tied closely to the text. Candidates with solid B2 reading and writing usually find the paper manageable; the marks are lost on precision, not on difficulty.

Start with reading comprehension, because it feeds everything else. Practise locating the exact line that supports each answer and justifying true/false items with a short quotation or paraphrase. Once that is reliable, move to contextual vocabulary and grammar, then to timed compositions. This order means your writing practice is built on text you have already learned to read closely.

Three patterns dominate: answers that paraphrase the general topic instead of the specific line asked about; true/false responses with no textual justification; and compositions that are long but inaccurate, with tense slips, missing articles and Spanish-influenced word order. A fourth is misreading instructions - for example, writing a summary when an opinion was requested, or ignoring a word limit.

Write at least one composition a week under timed conditions, using a clear structure: introduction, two developed body paragraphs, conclusion. Then revise it yourself for verb tense consistency, articles, prepositions and linking devices. Keep a personal list of connectors and academic collocations you actually use. Accuracy and organisation score better than ambitious vocabulary deployed incorrectly.

No fixed list is published, and texts are drawn from general-interest sources, so breadth matters more than any single topic. Read regularly across areas such as technology, environment, health, education and culture, and record collocations rather than isolated words. Contextual vocabulary items in the exam usually ask you to find a synonym or explain a phrase as it is used in the passage.

No. The standard PAU English paper is entirely written: reading comprehension, language-in-context exercises and a written production task. That means your preparation time is best spent on reading speed, close reading of evidence, and written accuracy. Do not spend hours on oral practice for this exam unless a separate certification requires it.