Changes in the Cambridge English First exams as of January 2015

Changes to Cambridge exams (as of January 2015)

Cambridge English: First

Reading and Use of English

• The Reading and Use of English papers have been combined.
• The revised paper takes 1 hour 15 minutes, which is 30 minutes shorter than the current Reading and Use of English papers.
• All the task types from both papers have been kept but the number of items in each task has been reduced.
• From 2015, there will be 7 parts and 52 questions.
• Use of English tasks come before Reading tasks so that there is a clear progression from a focus at word and sentence level to a focus on whole text.
   

Writing

• The compulsory Part 1 question is now an essay rather than an email or letter.
• The word count for both parts has increased to 140–190 words.
• In Part 2, candidates now choose from three questions rather than five, and candidates can decide to write an article, a report, a review or an email/letter.
• There will no longer be questions on set texts.
   

Listening

• All the current listening tasks are retained.
• In Part 1 the options are now not read out.
• In the Part 3 question there are now two additional distractors – so there are three distractors in all.
   

Speaking

• Overall the revised Speaking paper takes the same length of time and has the same number of parts and tasks but there are changes to each part.
• In Part 1, the timing has been reduced from 3 minutes to 2 minutes.
• In Part 2, the candidate response time has increased from 20 seconds to 30 seconds.
• In Part 3, the picture prompts are replaced with written prompts. The task is now split into two to include a discussion phase and a decision-making phase.
• The Part 4 timing has increased by one minute.