My thoughts on the DELE C1 exam: Reading comprehension

Now that I've come down from the high that was passing the DELE C1 exam, I wanted to give my thoughts on the exam format, my performance, and how prospective test takers should approach the test.

The test is designed to test your skills across a variety of settings, both formal and informal. According to the Instituto Cervantes, passing the C1 level certifies that you are able to:

• Understand a wide variety of long, quite demanding texts, as well as recognize implicit meanings in them.
• Express themselves fluently and spontaneously, without any obvious effort to find the right words.
• Use the language flexibly and effectively for social, academic, and professional purposes.
• And be able to produce clear, well-structured, detailed texts on topics having a certain level of complexity, with correct use of mechanisms for organizing and articulating a cohesive text.

As such, the C1 level of this exam (and I can't speak for other levels) is divided into 4 sections, or pruebas. Each prueba contains 2-5 tasks, or tareas.

Because I have quite a bit to say, I'm going to split this up into 4 posts, each dedicated to a single prueba.

Prueba 1: Reading comprehension and use of language. 

Here, you have 90 minutes to answer 40 questions. As the DELE objectives mention, the texts are actually quite demanding (and boring, I'll add!). And, unlike in the B2 level, the questions associated with them are much more specific and detailed.

One text will usually be a formal agreement, like a contract, lease, medical prescription, etc. You are supposed to answer specific questions on whether you can or can't do something according to the agreement. This section is harder than you think. When I took the test, sometimes 2 or even 3 of the answer choices seemed perfectly reasonable. You have to read the document really carefully, and use a bit of deductive logic (LSAT anyone?) to really get to the heart of what the question asked.

One text will be an essay, typically a historical account, where several of the paragraphs have been removed. At the end of the essay, you get a bank of paragraphs that you need to insert into the right spots depending on context. Whereas in the formal agreement text you had to understand really specific details, here they want you to be able to look at the big picture. Even though I am pretty sure I got most of the questions right in this section, I thought it was pretty hard. The thing that helped me was to use the test itself for hints. For example, if one of the paragraphs in the bank uses an acronym, don't insert it in the text before that acronym is defined. Similarly, if they talk about an important figure's actions, usually you wouldn't put him in the essay before they introduce the character in the first place. That helped me eliminate a lot of answer choices.

One text will be an opinion article of some sort, valuing or devaluing an aspect of our society, and you are supposed to answer questions on the themes and concepts of the text. I think mine was on the value of using scientific methods in our every day search for knowledge. This is most similar to what you'd see on an SAT Verbal section (if you're from the United States). I honestly don't have that much to say in terms of prepping for this one, except to generally improve your reading comprehension. To practice, I'd suggest going through Spanish language newspapers like El País and read through their op-eds.
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One text will give you 5 or 6 short summaries, a paragraph long, each describing a different work within a particular field (for example, reviews of 6 different ballet concerts, or abstracts of 6 different scientific publications on childhood development). The questions that follow describe one of them, and you are supposed to identify which one. This section was straightforward, but triiickky. There are two reasons for this: (1) all the summaries are on the same topic, so after reading 6 of them, they kind of blend together in your mind; and (2) the questions are really abstract. To go over the second one even more, let's say the summaries are on medical experiments. One question might say something like "Which study used interviews with scientists as the basis of the report?" You may glance through the articles and find that 3 or 4 of them mention "interviews with scientists." But reading through each summary again in detail, you find that one of them was just an interview to get the scientist's reaction, and another one was just an interview with a scientist to get advice on the experiment itself. Only one of them used interviews with scientists to help them come to a conclusion. Okay, now that you've spent 45 seconds reading that breakdown in English, imagine doing that in Spanish for 8 questions under a relatively severe time constraint. This section is relatively stressful.

The final prueba is probably most similar to something you'd see on a Spanish quiz in high school or college. You basically get a story or essay with 10 or 15 blanks. Each blank corresponds to a multiple choice answer set. When I began preparing for this test, I thought that this particular section would be the easiest. Boy, was I wrong. Keep in mind that the C1 level is the very last time you will ever review grammar in and of itself. C2 is basically all style and vocabulary. As such, the grammar that they test you on in C1 is fucking obscure (pardon my language). The best way to prepare for this section is to really know your grammar. They love testing on le vs. lo, le vs. se, the subjunctive, and really obscure past tenses like the preterite perfect (think hubo vuelto). There's a variety of others. I'd like to think my grammar isn't bad, but in my practice exams I typically got 25-30% of the questions wrong. Even now, with an additional few months of learning Spanish after the exam, I still miss like 15-20% of the questions in this section. Yes, I am still taking practice DELE C1 exams even though I've already passed. I love punishment.

Wel'p, that's it. I think that my score of 17.5/25 was pretty fair. I definitely thought I got a passing mark (60%), but I also didn't knock it out of the park.

In my next post I'll go over the listening section of the test.

Stay tuned.