TCF Canada writing: three tasks, three registers, and a keyboard that fights you
Aman Batth · 17 min read · · Updated
Expression écrite is not one writing test with three prompts. It is three different documents for three different readers, and the most common way to lose marks is to write all three the same way — in correct French. Plus the problem nobody else writes about: producing é è à ç on a keyboard that does not have them.
Most TCF writing advice is a list of tips: plan first, structure your ideas, use linking words, check your grammar. All of it is true. None of it tells you the thing that decides your mark, which is that the three tâches are not three sizes of the same exercise. They are three different documents, written to three different readers, in three different registers.
A candidate who produces 150 words of grammatically clean French in one undifferentiated block can still lose marks on criteria that have nothing to do with grammar — because the marking is criteria-based, and "correct French" only answers one of them.
This page is about the two things that actually move an expression écrite mark: getting the register and the shape of each tâche right, and being able to physically type French under a clock. The second one sounds trivial. It is not, and almost nobody writes about it.
The three tâches, and what each one is
France Éducation international sets expression écrite as three exercises in 60 minutes, each with its own brief and its own hard word limits.
| Tâche | What you write | Reader | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A message that describes, recounts or explains | One or more named recipients, whose status the prompt states | 60–120 |
| 2 | An article, letter or note reporting an experience, plus comments, opinions or arguments serving a purpose — to claim something, to make amends | Several recipients at once | 120–150 |
| 3 | A text comparing the two points of view in two supplied documents, then giving your own | A newspaper, a website, a colleague or a superior | 120–180 |
Those limits are the exam's own brief, not a guideline, and missing them is not a proportional deduction. France Éducation international states that an expression écrite paper can be graded « A1 non atteint » if a tâche is not written with the required number of words — in either direction — if the production is off-topic, or if one or more tâches are simply not done. On a paper sitting, illegible handwriting carries the same risk. Whichever side you miss on, the consequence is stated against the paper, not against that one answer.
Confirm the current format and limits on France Éducation international's TCF Canada page before you book. Test specifications are revised, and a table in a blog post — including this one — is a snapshot rather than an authority.
One current caveat from FEI, and it bears directly on this page: for sessions from 1 September 2026, re-correction requests on expression orale and expression écrite are suspended for about a year, with the service expected back in autumn 2027. You cannot appeal an expression mark right now — which raises the cost of getting the word count or the task wrong.
Notice what changes as you go down that table. It is not the length. It is the status of the reader the consigne names, and that is the whole exam.
What the register difference looks like in actual sentences
Here is one idea — the library closes too early — written three times, once for each tâche.
Tâche 1, to a friend. Second person, contractions of thought, a direct request, a short sign-off.
Salut Camille, tu sais que la bibliothèque ferme à 18 h ? C'est vraiment trop tôt quand on travaille la journée. Tu viens avec moi samedi matin ? À bientôt.
Tâche 2, to a readership. No tu, no named addressee. You are recounting an experience and giving an impression, so the first person stays, but it is aimed at strangers.
J'ai passé trois mois à étudier dans cette bibliothèque, et une chose m'a surpris : elle ferme à 18 heures. Pour un étudiant qui travaille la journée, c'est une porte fermée.
Tâche 3, to a newspaper or a superior. The two documents are attributed before your opinion appears at all, the connectors carry the argument, and the opinion is stated rather than exclaimed.
Le premier document souligne le coût d'une ouverture prolongée, tandis que le second insiste sur l'accès à l'étude. Il me semble que ces deux arguments ne s'opposent pas réellement.
Now the same three ideas written in the wrong register:
- Tâche 1 to a service, written like Tâche 1 to a friend. The prompt says écrivez au service client. You open with Salut and address them as tu. That is not a style preference — the task named a recipient and you answered a different one, so it lands on task fulfilment.
- Tâche 3 written like Tâche 2. Je trouve ça nul, franchement. Fluent, natural, and wrong for a text destined for a newspaper or a manager.
- Tâche 2 written like Tâche 3. A stiff Madame, Monsieur opening on an article written for a readership, closing with Je vous prie d'agréer l'expression de mes salutations distinguées. Over-formality is a register error in exactly the same way under-formality is.
The practical rule: read the prompt for the recipient before you read it for the topic. The topic decides your vocabulary. The recipient decides everything else — pronoun, greeting, sign-off, sentence length, and whether an exclamation mark is allowed anywhere near your answer.
The failure mode is structure, not vocabulary
The second thing that separates a scoring answer from a correct one is that each tâche has a shape, and the shape is part of what is being marked.
Tâche 1 is a message, so it needs the furniture of a message: a greeting, the facts in the order the reader needs them, the request stated explicitly, a closing formula. Cordialement to a service, À bientôt to a friend. A candidate who writes 100 words of perfectly good French with no greeting and no sign-off has written a paragraph, not a message.
Tâche 2 recounts an experience and gives your impressions. Both halves are in the brief. An answer that narrates beautifully and never says what you made of it has done half the task.
Tâche 3 has a trap in it, and it is always the same trap. FEI asks for two things: a text that compares the two points of view in the supplied documents, and your own argued opinion on the theme they treat. The common answer skips straight to the opinion and uses the documents as ammunition — which delivers one of the two things asked for. Attributing before you argue is the reliable way to make sure both are visibly there: le premier document… tandis que le second…, and only then quant à moi.
This is why one long undifferentiated paragraph of clean French loses marks. The criteria are not all linguistic, so linguistic quality cannot cover for them.
The keyboard problem
Here is the part of TCF preparation that is real, specific, and almost entirely unwritten about.
To write French you need é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô ù û ü, plus œ and the guillemets « ». On a standard QWERTY keyboard, none of those is a key. Producing one means an operating-system shortcut you half-remember, a character-map dialogue, or holding a key down and waiting for a pop-up menu.
In a 60-minute test with three word-counted tasks, that costs you twice:
- Time. Every accent you fight for is time not spent on the argument, and the word minimums are not generous enough to absorb it.
- Accuracy, when you eventually give up and leave the accent off. And this is the expensive one, because a missing accent is a spelling error, and spelling sits inside the linguistic criterion — the same criterion your grammar is marked under.
It is not only spelling. In French an accent can change the word outright:
| Without the accent | With it | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| ou | où | "or" becomes "where" |
| a | à | "has" becomes "to / at" |
| sur | sûr | "on" becomes "sure" |
| du | dû | "of the" becomes "owed / had to" |
| mur | mûr | "wall" becomes "ripe" |
| tache | tâche | "stain" becomes "task" |
That last row is not a joke at anyone's expense: tâche is the word the exam uses for its own tasks.
So a dropped accent is not always a cosmetic slip a marker forgives. Sometimes it is a different sentence.
A free French keyboard, no account
We ship a French accent keyboard inside the product — it sits in the writing box on TCF writing practice, so you are inserting accents in the same place you are being marked. We also put a free public version on this site, with no sign-up and nothing stored: French keyboard online.
It works three ways, because candidates arrive with different habits:
- Click the character you need.
- Type the letter, then the punctuation mark.
e'gives é,e`gives è,e^gives ê,a`gives à,c,gives ç,u`gives ù,o^gives ô. None of these pairs is a sequence French actually produces — the elisions that put an apostrophe mid-word (l', d', qu', j', n', s') are not among them — so nothing you type is ever silently rewritten. - Paste from anywhere and keep editing.
One deliberate exception, and it shows why the pairs are built that way: œ and æ are click-only. A letter-plus-letter shortcut on oe would quietly turn moelleux, coefficient and coexister into nonsense while you watched. A shortcut that corrupts real words is worse than no shortcut.
The page also carries the real 60–120, 120–150 and 120–180 counters, and the count turns amber the moment you leave the band in either direction — which, given how FEI treats a missed word count, is the moment you want to notice.
Four pairs — e', e`, a` and c, — will cover most of what you type. Learning them is an afternoon, and it is the cheapest marks you will recover in this exam.
Why switching to AZERTY for practice is a trap
The obvious fix is to set your computer to a French AZERTY layout and practise on that. It is usually the wrong move, for three reasons.
You may not be typing on it. Accounts of what the exam machine provides differ — some candidates describe a French layout, others an English QWERTY with accents inserted through the exam software. We are not going to assert which you will get, because it is a test-centre detail and we cannot verify it for your centre. Ask your own centre. If you retrain your muscle memory onto AZERTY and are then handed a QWERTY, you have made test day harder, not easier.
The retraining is not free. AZERTY moves A, Q, Z, W, M and the whole number row. Your typing speed drops for weeks before it recovers — weeks you are supposed to be spending on register and structure.
It solves the wrong problem. The skill you actually need on test day is producing accented French quickly on whatever is in front of you. Practising the letter-then-punctuation pairs gives you that on any layout. Memorising key positions gives it to you on one.
If you are comfortable on AZERTY already, keep it. If you are not, do not start six weeks before the exam.
What our marker actually returns
Two honest framings before the detail.
First, France Éducation international publishes more of its marking procedure than most candidates realise — and less than enough to reproduce it. It publishes this: expression écrite papers are marked twice, fully independently and double-blind, by correctors FEI selects on their experience in French as a foreign language and in assessment, trains specifically on TCF expression écrite, and monitors for quality. It also publishes that a paper sat on computer may have its first correction done by FIDELIA, FEI's own automated marking aid — only the second correction is guaranteed human. So the human judgement this page is about is real, but on a computer-delivered paper it may not be the first pass over your text.
What FEI does not publish is the weight of each criterion, or the arithmetic that turns three criteria into a mark out of 20. What we can say is that any criteria-based assessment has to do one thing: score each criterion separately, or the criteria are not criteria. That reasoning is ours, not theirs.
Second, we can describe our own marker exactly, because we built it. Here is what comes back from TCF writing practice on Hilingo, per attempt:
| What you get | What it is |
|---|---|
| A mark out of 20, with the NCLC band beside it | TCF's own scale, never an invented percentage. The /20 itself is our estimate. The /20 → NCLC step is not — that is IRCC's published equivalency table, reproduced exactly. |
| Langue — out of 20 | Grammar, syntax, vocabulary and conventions. Spelling and punctuation are inside conventions, which is where a missing accent lands. |
| Capacité pragmatique — out of 20 | A logical, well-connected argument — built from cohesion and phraseology. |
| Capacité sociolinguistique — register | Reported as not measured. Not a number, not a zero, not a guess. |
| Your word count against the tâche's limits | Under the tâche's own minimum the mark is trimmed in proportion to how far short you came, down to a floor of half marks, rather than zeroed — you still wrote French and still earn for it. That is deliberately gentler than the real exam, where a missed word count puts « A1 non atteint » on the table. |
Read the fourth row again, because it is the awkward one and we would rather say it than bury it: the criterion this entire page is built around is the one our automated marker refuses to score. Register — adéquation à la situation de communication — is one of the three criteria FEI names, and the one that grammar practice cannot reach. What it is worth relative to the other two is not published, so nobody can tell you, us included. What we can say is that it is a judgement about a social situation, and we do not have a way to measure it that we would trust enough to put a number on. Printing one anyway would be worse than printing nothing.
So the honest instruction is: use the per-criterion marks to find whether you are leaking on language or on argument, and check your register a different way. Writing tasks in the bank carry a worked B2/C1 model answer, the structural template it demonstrates, and the connector line that goes with it, on the same card as your own attempts. Comparing your Salut against a model that opens Madame, Monsieur is the check the number cannot give you.
A single figure out of 20 conflates all of this. "You lost it on conventions" and "you lost it on your argument" are different problems with different fixes, and that is the whole reason the criteria are reported apart.
The rest of the TCF preparation, briefly
Expression écrite does not sit alone, and the rule that governs all of it is the one from our TCF Canada strategy page: your lowest ability decides whether the 50-point French bonus arrives; the per-ability points are scored on each ability separately. Writing at NCLC 9 earns its own points but cannot buy back the bonus that speaking at NCLC 6 forfeits. The full conversion tables for both TCF scales are in the TCF Canada score chart, with IRCC's own equivalency page cited — check it there rather than here, because those tables change.
What we run for TCF, stated plainly: 39 full TCF Canada mocks and 156 section tests. A section test is one section of a full paper offered on its own — a compréhension orale, or an expression écrite — so it is a shorter sitting rather than an extra mock. We count them separately because calling 195 of them "full mocks" would not be true.
Alongside that: a scored tenses and conjugation quiz, because tense errors are the quiet repeatable loss in expression écrite. A TCF study centre keyed to your weakest skill. Objective answers that carry a stored explanation come back with it, and the passage or the transcript is shown beside the question. An AI teacher (Premium) that works from your own result rather than generic advice, and question translation in 50 languages — because if your French is not yet strong enough to read French feedback, that is exactly when you need the feedback most.
On speaking, one thing worth naming because it is the hardest part of French to judge from inside your own head: our read-aloud practice shows the expected pronunciation of each word and the pronunciation we heard, both in phonetic notation — IPA, symbol by symbol — with fluency, a pause and pace reading derived from your long-pause count and your words per second, and your transcript; a live waveform runs while you record so you can see the microphone is picking you up. The pronunciation score itself is word-level rather than a sound-by-sound judgement, and it is not yet calibrated against real TCF marks — our own code says so in as many words, so we say it here too. Read-aloud is our own drill rather than a TCF task, and the product says so; it exists because pronunciation is the one thing you cannot assess from inside your own head.
TEF Canada mocks are in development and are not available yet.
What to do this week
- Write one of each tâche, not three of the one you like. The registers are the skill. Doing three Tâche 3s teaches you one register.
- Read every prompt for its recipient first. Write the pronoun and the sign-off down before you write a sentence.
- Learn four keyboard pairs —
e',e`,a`,c,— on the free French keyboard. One afternoon, and accents stop costing you time and conventions marks. - Get one answer marked per criterion, so you know whether you are leaking on language or on argument before you spend another month on vocabulary.
Your first full TCF Canada mock is free and needs no card. It runs all four parts under the real section timers and reports compréhension on the 100–699 scale TCF uses, as an estimate — TCF applies a barème that weights each question by its difficulty, and we cannot reproduce that, so treat the band and its CEFR level as the signal rather than the digit — and expression out of 20 with the NCLC band beside it — so you can see which ability is your floor before you pay a test-centre fee to find out.
Free, no account needed:
- French keyboard online — free, no account, with the real expression écrite word limits
- TCF Canada strategy — what an NCLC level is actually worth in CRS points
- TCF Canada score chart — both scales converted to NCLC, with IRCC's source page
- TCF Canada reading and TCF Canada listening — the two objective tests
- Start a TCF Canada mock — the exam page, with the sample report layout
Frequently asked questions
How many words do you need for TCF Canada writing?
Three tâches with three different limits: 60–120 words for Tâche 1, 120–150 for Tâche 2, and 120–180 for Tâche 3, in 60 minutes total. Treat them as hard limits in both directions: France Éducation international states that a paper can be graded « A1 non atteint » if a tâche is not written with the required number of words, if the production is off-topic, or if a tâche is left undone. Confirm the current limits on France Éducation international's own TCF Canada page before you book.
How is TCF Canada expression écrite marked?
Out of 20, against criteria rather than as a single impression: linguistic (vocabulary, grammar, spelling, sentence control), pragmatic (coherence, cohesion, how the argument develops) and sociolinguistic (whether your register fits the situation). IRCC then converts that /20 to an NCLC level. Your points are scored on each ability's own level; your lowest of the four is what decides eligibility and whether the French bonus arrives. The conversion tables are on IRCC's language test equivalency page, which is the page that governs your application.
Do accents matter in the TCF writing test?
Yes. Spelling sits inside the linguistic criterion, and to a marker ecrire is a misspelling of écrire rather than the same word typed quickly. Some accents change the word outright — ou and où, sur and sûr, a and à — so a dropped accent is not always a cosmetic slip.
How do I type French accents on a QWERTY keyboard?
Use a tool that does it without changing your system layout. Our free French keyboard online lets you click the character, or type the letter followed by a punctuation mark — e' gives é, a` gives à, c, gives ç. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere and there is no sign-up.
What score do I need in TCF Canada writing for NCLC 7?
10 out of 20 in expression écrite, on IRCC's published equivalency table. But NCLC 7 in writing alone is not enough for the French bonus — that threshold reads your lowest of the four abilities, so listening, reading and speaking all have to clear the same line, even though the points themselves are awarded per ability on each ability's own level. The full tables for both TCF scales are in our TCF Canada score chart, and you should verify them at IRCC before you book, because they are revised.
Why is my French correct but my TCF writing score still low?
Almost always register or structure. Each tâche names a different reader, whose status the consigne states, and the marking is criteria-based, so linguistic quality cannot cover for a task you did not shape the way it was asked for. The most common single loss is Tâche 3 answered as a straight opinion piece, with the comparison of the two documents that the brief also asks for left out entirely.