Every candidate wants the same thing a month before the exam: the actual topics. That’s fair. At that stage, rehearsing on realistic subjects is worth more than any amount of grammar revision.
Here’s what nobody tells you, though. Chasing individual topics is the wrong game. Subjects rotate constantly, but the families barely move. Prepare one solid plan per family, and you’ll have something to say for whatever card you draw. That’s how we run rehearsal in class, and it’s the thinking behind our TCF Canada speaking sample papers and our TCF Canada online preparation course.
Everything below comes from our own students’ reports after their sessions. It’s a recall, not leaked material, and it’s a guide to themes rather than a prediction of your paper.
What Topics Come Up in TCF Canada Expression Écrite?
Students most often report Tâche 1 messages about invitations, apologies, complaints, and requests to a neighbor, colleague, or landlord. Tâche 2 draws on a supplied notice or article about local services, workplace changes, or community events. Tâche 3: pair two opposing opinions on themes like remote work, city versus village life, technology, or the environment.
The three tasks require genuinely different writing, so prepare them separately rather than as a single block.
| Task | Words | Reported subject types |
|---|---|---|
| Tâche 1 | 60 to 120 | Invitation, apology, complaint, request, thanks, cancellation |
| Tâche 2 | 120 to 150 | Local services, workplace change, community notice, a shared facility |
| Tâche 3 | 120 to 180 | Remote work, urban life, technology, environment, education, health |
One detail for Tâche 3 that almost nobody publishes: those 120 to 180 words should be split into roughly 40 to 60 words summarising the two viewpoints, then 80 to 120 words stating your own position. Get the balance wrong, and you lose marks even with clean French, because the task asks for both parts, and a lopsided answer only does half of it. Our TCF Canada writing sample papers work through corrected examples with the split marked.
Tâche 2 catches people differently. The supplied document constrains you. If the notice mentions three changes and you respond to one, you’ve written a decent text that answers the wrong question.
What Topics Come Up in TCF Canada Expression Orale?
Tâche 1 stays personal: your studies, your job, your city, your family, why you’re learning French. Tâche 2 is a role-play where you ask questions about a course, a flat, a trip, or a service. Tâche 3 asks for your opinion on a social theme, and the reported subjects cluster around work, technology, health, the environment, and education.
Tâche 3 is where scores are won and lost, because you speak for four and a half minutes with no preparation at all.
Reported Tâche 2 scenarios tend to be practical and everyday: enquiring about a language course, renting an apartment, joining a gym, booking a trip, arranging a repair. What varies is the detail you need to extract, not the shape of the exchange.
For Tâche 1, the reported questions are stable enough to prepare properly. Where are you from? What do you do? Why French? What do you do at the weekend? Tell me about your family. The risk here isn’t difficulty. It’s sounding rehearsed, which I’ll come back to.
Read our guide to the TCF Canada exam day and the TCF Canada Preparation while working.
What Topics Come Up in TEF Canada Writing and Speaking?
TEF Canada Section A writing gives you the opening of a news item to continue, usually an everyday incident, such as an accident, a theft, a local event, or an unusual discovery. Section B asks you to argue a position, commonly on the environment, technology, work, city life, or education. Speaking Section A is a role-play where you ask questions, and Section B asks you to persuade someone who pushes back.
The fait divers is the one Indian candidates find genuinely alien, because the genre doesn’t exist in the same form in our newspapers. You’re continuing a short news story, not writing an essay. Different register, different tenses, different shape entirely. Our TEF Canada writing sample papers show corrected continuations against the reported opening types.
For Section A speaking, reported scenarios revolve around an advertisement or notice for a course, a flat, an event, a service, or a job. Your task is to extract information, so the subject matters less than the range of your questions.
For Section B speaking, the reported scenarios usually involve negotiations at work or with someone close to you: persuading a manager about a schedule change, convincing a friend about a holiday plan, or arguing against a decision that affects you. The examiner will resist. That resistance is the task, not a sign you’re doing badly.
Do Reading and Listening Have Predictable Themes Too?
Yes, though they matter less for preparation because you’re not producing language. Reported reading documents cluster around housing notices, workplace emails, transport and municipal information, health advice, and short press articles. Listening reports the same words in spoken form: announcements, voicemail messages, street interviews, and radio segments.
The practical use of this is vocabulary, not prediction. If you know the words that appear in housing and administrative documents, a whole block of reading questions gets easier. Knowing which specific notice appears would not help you at all.
That’s the honest difference between the productive and receptive papers. For speaking and writing, preparing your topic directly improves your answers. For reading and listening, it improves your vocabulary and nothing else.
Which Themes Repeat Most Often Across Both Exams?
Six families cover most of what students report across every task type: work and careers, technology and social media, environment and climate, health and lifestyle, education and study, and city life, including transport and housing.
If you’re short of time, prepare exactly those six. For each one, you want roughly fifteen usable words and phrases, two arguments on each side, and one concrete example you can actually describe in detail.
The example is the part people skip, and it matters more than they expect. A real detail is what separates a B2 answer from a B1 one. “Pollution is a problem in my city” is at B1 level. “In Noida, the air quality index passes 400 in November, and my daughter’s school closed for three days last winter” is B2, and it’s the same grammar.
Once you know your target band, you can work out how much of this you actually need. Our CEFR-to-CLB and NCLC converter shows what each level maps to across the two exams.
How Do You Turn a Topic Family Into a Plan That Stretches?
Write one plan per family with four parts: a position, two arguments with an example each, one concession to the other side, and a closing line. Then test it against three different subjects from that family. If it survives all three with minor changes, it’s a plan. If it only fits one, it’s a script.
Here’s a worked example from the technology family.
- Position: technology saves time but costs attention.
- Argument one: remote work eliminated my commute, giving me back 10 hours a week.
- Argument two: the same tools mean work follows me home, and I check messages at eleven at night.
Concession: for people with limited mobility or long commutes, the balance is clearly positive. - Close: the tool is neutral; the boundaries are ours to set.
Now watch it stretch. That plan answers “Is remote work good for society?” “Do smartphones make us more or less free?”, “Should children have screens?”, and “Is technology improving or damaging family life?” Four subjects, one preparation.
Build five or six of these, and you’ve covered more ground than sixty memorized answers, with far less to remember under pressure.
Why Do Memorized Answers Score Badly?
Because examiners can hear them. A memorized answer is unusually fluent for the first thirty seconds, then collapses the moment the examiner asks something slightly off-script. The contrast between the two halves is obvious, and it reads as lower ability than an honest, slightly hesitant answer throughout.
I’ve heard this hundreds of times in mock sessions. The candidate delivers a polished opening, the examiner asks one follow-up, and the whole thing falls apart because there was never any thinking behind the words.
A plan behaves differently under pressure. When the follow-up comes, you still have a position and reasons, so you can answer from them rather than searching for the next memorized line.
Build the plan, not the script. Then rehearse the plan out loud enough times that the structure is automatic while the words stay fresh.
How Should You Rehearse If You Only Have Three Weeks?
Pick your six families, write one plan each in week one, rehearse each plan against three subjects in week two, and spend week three on timed full-length practice with someone correcting you. Cover speaking and writing before reading and listening, since those are where topic preparation actually changes your score.
A workable three-week shape:
- Week one: six plans written, vocabulary sheet per family, no timing pressure
- Week two: each plan is spoken aloud against three subjects, recorded, and reviewed
- Week three: full timed tasks under exam conditions, corrected by someone else
Record yourself in week two even though you’ll hate listening back. The hesitations and repeated fillers you notice in a recording are the exact things an examiner is marking, and you cannot hear them while you’re speaking.
How Current Is This Page, and What Should You Not Trust?
We update it as students report back after each session. Exam boards do not publish live topics, and any site claiming to have the current paper is either guessing or selling something. What you get here is recall from candidates who sat the real thing, grouped into themes.
Treat it accordingly. Themes are stable and genuinely useful. Specific subjects are indicative, not a forecast.
Be skeptical of anything sold as leaked papers or guaranteed questions. Beyond the ethics, it doesn’t work: a candidate who prepares twenty specific subjects and meets a twenty-first has nothing, while a candidate with six plans has an answer either way.
For the official structure of each paper, France Éducation International publishes the TCF Canada format, and the TEF board documents its own changes to the exam. Check the format against those, not against a blog.
Rehearse These With Someone Who Corrects You
Three things to take away. Prepare families of topics rather than individual subjects. Build plans that stretch across several subjects instead of scripts you recite. And put most of your rehearsal into TCF Tâche 3 and TEF Section B, because that’s where the marks actually move.
Reading a list of topics doesn’t improve your French. Speaking on those topics to someone who stops you and corrects you does. Our batches run 6 to 10 students, so everyone speaks in every session and gets regular individual feedback.
Call or WhatsApp us with your exam date, or visit the center in Noida and sit in on a rehearsal class before you decide.