Preparing for a Concours in Your Second Language

Sitting a competitive examination in your second language is a specific problem, and almost nothing written about exam preparation addresses it.

In Cameroon this is ordinary rather than unusual. Anglophone candidates sit concours where the paper, the instructions or the general knowledge section run in French. Francophone candidates face the reverse. Both groups are competing against people working in their first language, on a ranked paper where the last place decides the line.

The mistake almost everyone makes is treating this as a language problem to be solved by improving the language. It is a time problem, and the fix is mostly technical. You are not going to become a native speaker before the paper. You can become considerably faster at reading questions and producing answers in a fixed set of formats, and that is where the marks are.

Work out which part is actually costing you

Second language difficulty is not one thing. Diagnose before you spend months on the wrong one.

What happens	What it really is	Where to spend the time
You misunderstand what is being asked	Instruction vocabulary	Learn the command words in that language
You understand but read slowly	Reading speed	Timed reading practice, daily
You know the answer, cannot phrase it	Production	Sentence frames, written out and reused
You know the subject in the other language	Technical vocabulary	Term pair cards, both directions
You run out of time overall	All of the above compounding	Full timed papers, weekly

Sit one past paper and note, per question, which row applies. Most candidates discover it is rows one and three, and that general language study addresses neither efficiently.

Learn the instruction words first

This is the highest return hour available to you, and it is a small, finite list.

Every paper is built from a handful of command words. In French papers you will meet expliquez, décrivez, comparez, justifiez, analysez, commentez, dégagez, relevez, en quoi, dans quelle mesure. Misreading one of those does not cost you some marks. It costs you the whole question, because you will answer a different question correctly.

Make cards for these before you make cards for anything else. Front: the command word. Back: what it requires and roughly how long the answer should be. Twenty or thirty cards covers essentially every paper you will sit.

Note that these do not always map neatly onto their apparent English equivalents. Dans quelle mesure is closer to “to what extent”, which requires a judgement, not a description. Learn what each one demands rather than what it translates to. Our guide to what examiners mean by describe, explain and evaluate covers the underlying ladder, and it holds across both languages.

Build term pairs, both directions

You almost certainly know your subject. What you may not have is the vocabulary for it in the examination language, and that gap is narrow and closable.

Go through your syllabus and list the technical terms. Then make cards running in the harder direction: prompt in your first language, answer in the examination language. Recognising a term when you read it is easy. Producing it when writing is the skill under test, and only one direction trains it.

Do not translate a whole textbook. The examinable vocabulary in a single subject is usually a few hundred terms, and the syllabus tells you which.

Prepare sentence frames, not sentences

This is the technique that helps most with production, and hardly anyone uses it.

Academic answers reuse a small number of structures. Rather than composing each one from scratch under time pressure, prepare the frames and slot your content into them.

Frames for stating a position, for introducing evidence, for conceding a point before rejecting it, for concluding. In French, constructions built around il convient de, on constate que, cela s’explique par, en revanche, par conséquent do an enormous amount of structural work and can be learned as fixed units.

Learn ten of these properly and your writing becomes both faster and more idiomatic, because you are producing constructions a native writer would actually use rather than translating your own sentence word by word.

Read in the examination language every day

Reading speed improves with volume and almost nothing else, and it improves faster than people expect.

Fifteen minutes daily is enough, and what you read matters less than that you read consistently. News, a textbook in that language, anything with a formal register. Do not stop to look up every word, since that trains you to stop, which is precisely the habit that costs you time in the hall.

For general knowledge papers this doubles as content revision. Following national and regional affairs in the examination language prepares you for the paper and the language simultaneously, which is the most efficient hour in this whole plan.

The culture générale problem

Several concours include a general knowledge paper with no published syllabus, and for a second language candidate this feels doubly impossible.

It is more approachable than it looks. Read past papers to see the actual range, which is usually narrower than the absence of a syllabus suggests. Follow current affairs consistently rather than intensively. And practise structuring an answer quickly, because on this paper organisation earns marks that content alone does not.

A clearly structured answer in imperfect language routinely outscores a fluent one that wanders. Structure is the thing you can control completely, and it is worth more here than vocabulary.

Time the reading separately

A practical adjustment that changes results.

When you sit timed papers, note how long you spend reading before you start writing. Second language candidates frequently spend far longer on this than they realise, then discover the shortfall at the end of the paper rather than at the beginning.

Once you know your real reading time, plan around it. That may mean deciding in advance to attempt slightly fewer optional questions and to complete those properly, which is usually the better trade in a ranked competition where finishing matters.

The wider argument for finishing over perfecting is in preparing for a concours when you do not know the cut off.

The advantage nobody mentions

Worth saying, because this article has so far been about difficulty.

A candidate who can work credibly in both languages has roughly twice the options of one who cannot. That applies to concours, to universities across both subsystems, to institutions in neighbouring countries, and to employment afterwards. Very few of your competitors have it.

So the work you are doing now is not only about passing this paper. It is building something durable, and that is a reasonable thing to hold onto during the months when it feels like an obstacle rather than an asset.

If there is an oral stage

Some concours shortlist from the written paper and then interview, and for a second language candidate this is where the anxiety concentrates.

Two things help more than general language practice. Rehearse the predictable questions aloud, because why this school, why this field and what you intend to do afterwards are asked almost every time, and having said your answer aloud twenty times removes most of the hesitation. Learn how to buy a moment, using ordinary phrases that native speakers use while thinking. A brief pause filled naturally reads as consideration. Silence reads as not understanding, even when you did.

Practise speaking your reasoning rather than writing it, since these are different skills and only one of them is being assessed here. Explaining a topic aloud to someone who does not study it is the cheapest preparation available and it trains exactly the right thing.

If you genuinely do not understand a question, ask for it to be repeated rather than answering something else. Asking is normal and answering the wrong question is not recoverable.

Questions candidates ask

Should I answer in my stronger language if allowed?

Check the rules for your specific concours before assuming either way, because they vary and are not always obvious from the paper. Where you genuinely have a choice, answer in the language you can produce fastest and most accurately under time. Where you do not, this article is the preparation.

Will examiners penalise my grammar?

In a subject paper, marks generally follow content and structure rather than linguistic polish, though an answer that cannot be understood cannot be credited. Aim for clear and simple rather than ambitious. Short correct sentences beat long ones that collapse.

Is a language course worth the money?

Usually less than targeted work. A general course teaches conversation and everyday vocabulary, which is not what the paper tests. Command words, technical terms, sentence frames and timed reading are specific, free, and address the actual gap.

How long does this take?

The command words and sentence frames are a few weeks of consistent work. Reading speed improves over months, which is why it should start now rather than in the final stretch.

Start this week

Take one past paper in the examination language and make cards for every command word in it. That is probably fewer than twenty cards and it removes the most expensive category of error immediately.

Then start the fifteen minutes of daily reading. It is the slowest thing to improve, which is exactly why it should begin today.

More in Exams and Past Papers, including how a concours actually works.