xing Bilingual Diglot Newbie Singapore Joined 5646 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French Studies: Russian
| Message 1 of 4 05 July 2009 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
I'm probably going to take the SAT French Subject Test with listening. How's the level of difficulty compared to
DELF/DALF?
And if I'm looking at high 700s, technically, what level of DELF/DALF should I be at?
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victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7324 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 4 06 July 2009 at 4:37am | IP Logged |
I took the SAT French Subject Test without the listening, and didn't it find it difficult after 5 years of studying it at school. I got a 800 on my first try. 10% of all testers score 800, so a fairly large number of people receive a score in the 700s.
My advice would be to pick up a test prep book and see what the difficulty is like for you. The College Board also publishes previously used exams for your reference. My guess though is that it's around a B1 if you aim at answering almost everything correctly. There's a number of tricky vocab and grammar questions, as well as short reading passages.
By the way, don't feel pressured into taking the test with the listening portion - I don't think it hurt me a bit by not taking it. My personal experience was to take tests in a variety of subjects that I was confident in and pick the best to report on my application.
Anyway, I feel that the DELF and the SAT are very different tests in nature. The first deals with testing your ability to function in French and your familiarity with French culture, while the latter is more or less a way to sector off populations of American students for the purpose of college admissions.
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xing Bilingual Diglot Newbie Singapore Joined 5646 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French Studies: Russian
| Message 3 of 4 06 July 2009 at 5:39am | IP Logged |
Thanks (:
It's actually required for the course I'm about to take to have a SAT Language with Listening. I've read on this forum
where this mum was saying that her daughter who took high school french for 4 years and went for exchange
programme in France and only got about 680 so I'm slightly scared.
I took DELF and it's not so much about whether you're grammatically correct all the time but if people can
understand you reasonably and when i checked out the SAT books, it's filled with some obscure grammar and I got
freaked out.
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victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7324 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map
| Message 4 of 4 06 July 2009 at 11:17pm | IP Logged |
Just out of curiosity, which DELF did you take?
As with all SAT tests, questions vary in difficulty and the very difficult ones are designed to separate average from good students. Try a practice test and if you score in the 700s, I don't think there's a need for concern. In any case, you should know your grammar well, just for your own sake and in preparation of the test.
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