Taking the TCF for my carte de résidence application

I arrived to the school 15 minutes before my scheduled time on the convocation at 9 AM. The ELFE school is located on Rue Montmartre, right across from La Comptoir de la Gastronomie. It is at the end of the courtyard. For the TCF IRN, we were asked to sit in the waiting room until the instructor came down. The registration process took an hour, we had to wait our turn to be called up to the reception desk by the instructor so we could verify our information (name, email, phone number, address, etc). Our photo was also taken; this will be used on the certificate that we will receive when we get our scores. Thank goodness I brought my book!

Once everyone was registered, we went up to the examination room. We were asked to leave our personal affairs in a a coat room (only bring our IDs, headphones, and pens) and the rest would be locked during the duration of the exam. We were told to sit at any computer and plug our headphones in. This portion of the test covered reading comprehension, listening, and written expression. There were various types of formats; from reading a portion of a text and answering questions about it, hearing clips of audio and responding accordingly, and answering a variety of other questions. 

Each section was timed and once the time was up, you are not allowed to go back and change answers. There is some extra time at the end of each question to make sure that you have all the time to finish the questions. If you finish before the time limit for the section is over, you can go back and check your answers here too if you’d like. If you ever get done early and are confident in your responses, you are allowed to signal to the examen proctor that you’re ready to move on to the next part. 

When I took the TCF TP test in March 2020, our oral part was first and then our written/listening part last. There was also only 4 of us at that time taking the test. For the TCF IRN there were about 20 of us taking the test and we started with the written/listening part and then moved to the oral part. The oral section comprised of 3 exercises, all recorded to be reviewed later by the board. The first exercise was a simple introduction about yourself. You had 3 minutes to talk about yourself. I ended up rattling on and on and I am sure bored the instructor to death. If I got stuck or seemed like I wasn’t sure where to go next, she’d ask a question and get me talking again.

The other 2 exercises were a back and forth dialogue where I had to do most of the talking. One was about asking questions to my neighbor about watching her cat during vacation and the other was about booking a vacation through a rental agency. Throughout our conversation, the instructor was noting things down and grading me on my form paper. Once I was done, she dismissed me. 

At the end of the test, I checked in with the reception to see if there’s anything else I needed to do. They told me that I would be notified via email in about 3-4 weeks time for my results. When I came back to pick up my results, I needed to show reception my ID and they retrieved my examen certificate. I had to sign a form saying that I picked it up. And that was that. My certificate is good for the newt two years and should carry me through my nationality request in the very near future.