The same mistake on exam day
It is week ten. You open the correction of your latest Tâche 2, and there it is again, underlined: « une problème ». It was underlined in week one too.
You read the correction then, agreed with it, and moved on. Between those two dates you wrote perhaps twenty texts, and the mistake travelled through every one of them.
I think this is the quiet scandal of exam preparation. Not that candidates make mistakes, everyone does, but that they are told about each one, in writing, often with the rule attached, and the telling changes nothing.
Corrections are the most wasted resource a candidate has.
They arrive, they are read with a small wince, and they are filed away in an inbox nobody opens again.
On the day, the Expression écrite gives you 60 minutes for three tasks, and nobody underlines anything. You will not have time to remember what a teacher once said about past participles. What you write by reflex is what the examiner reads.
So the real question of the last three months is not how much French you know. It is what your hand does when it has no time to think.
Why “write more” is not the cure
The standard advice is volume: write a text a day, the errors will wear away. I disagree. Twenty texts with the same mistake are not twenty chances to fix it; they are twenty rehearsals of it.
Practice makes permanent, and what it makes permanent is whatever you practise.
What linguists call it
Linguists named this long ago.
- 1967. The applied linguist S. Pit Corder argued that a learner’s errors are not noise but evidence: they show the rules the learner is really using, as opposed to the ones they were taught.
- 1972. Larry Selinker gave the stubborn ones a name, fossilisation: forms that stay in a learner’s language long after the right one has been explained, and come back under strain.
An exam room is strain.
Read that way, your errors are the most useful document you own. A textbook tells you what French learners in general get wrong. Your corrections tell you what you get wrong, which is a much shorter list, and the only one that will be marked.
Rereading feels like learning
If you keep your corrections at all, you probably reread them. It feels productive. The research says it mostly is not, and one experiment shows why better than any argument.
Four readings, or one and three recalls
In 2006 Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, at Washington University in St. Louis, gave 180 students a short passage and four periods to learn it.
- Some read it four times.
- Some read it three times and then wrote down all they could remember.
- Some read it once and spent the other three periods recalling it.
Five minutes later the rereaders were ahead. A week later the order had flipped, and the rereaders had the least left. They were also the group most confident it would stick.
- Read four times40 %83% five minutes after learning
- Read three times, recalled once56 %78% five minutes after learning
- Read once, recalled three times61 %71% five minutes after learning
That last detail is the one I would pin above every candidate’s desk. Rereading a correction gives you the feeling of knowing, and the feeling is the trap. Pulling the right form out of your own memory is harder and less pleasant, and it is what lasts.
The rest of the evidence
The rest of the evidence points the same way.
- Testing yourself
- Spacing your practice
- Rereading
- Highlighting
- A review of 317 experiments led by Nicholas Cepeda (2006) found that practice spread out over time beats the same practice crammed together.
- Janet Metcalfe’s 2017 review at Columbia found that a mistake followed by its correction is a good moment to learn, not a bad one.
- For writing in a second language, a study of 268 secondary-school students in the Netherlands by Catherine van Beuningen, Nivja de Jong and Folkert Kuiken (2012) found that correction improved accuracy in new texts written afterwards, not only in the text that was corrected.
“If the goal is optimal performance in high-stakes situations, it may be worthwhile to allow and even encourage students to commit and correct errors while they are in low-stakes learning situations.” Janet Metcalfe, “Learning from errors”, Annual Review of Psychology, 2017
The TCF Canada is a high-stakes situation if anything is. Your practice texts are the low-stakes one. Make your mistakes there, and make each of them count.
The common mistakes, and your own three
Here is a list of errors that turn up again and again in the writing of adults preparing for the TCF Canada, many of them carried over from English.
I offer it with a warning: do not learn it. A list of other people’s mistakes is one more thing to reread. Use it to look at your own texts, and notice which three rows are yours.
| Error type | Written | Corrected | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gender | une problème, la système | un problème, le système | Nouns in -ème such as problème, système and thème are masculine, despite the final -e. |
| Agreement | Elle est allé à Montréal. | Elle est allée à Montréal. | With être, the past participle agrees with the subject. |
| Preposition with places | Je veux m’installer en Canada, à Ontario. | Je veux m’installer au Canada, en Ontario. | Au before a masculine country; en before a feminine one, or a masculine one starting with a vowel. |
| Preposition after a verb | participer dans un projet | participer à un projet | The French verb’s preposition, not the English one (participate in). |
| Tense after si | Si j’aurais plus de temps, je ferais du bénévolat. | Si j’avais plus de temps, je ferais du bénévolat. | After si expressing a condition, the imparfait; the conditional goes in the other clause. |
| Tense with depuis | J’ai habité ici depuis trois ans. | J’habite ici depuis trois ans. | For something still going on, depuis takes the present. |
| Subjunctive | Il faut que je vais au bureau. | Il faut que j’aille au bureau. | Il faut que takes the subjunctive. |
| False friend | Actuellement, je ne suis pas d’accord. | En fait, je ne suis pas d’accord. | Actuellement means currently, not actually. |
| Calque from English | Ça fait du sens. | Ça a du sens. | The Office québécois de la langue française advises against faire du sens, a literal copy of make sense. |
Look at how few of these come from not knowing the rule. Almost everyone who writes « elle est allé » can tell you the participle agrees.
They know it; their hand does not.
That gap, between knowing a rule and producing it at speed, is exactly what a notebook is for, and exactly what rereading cannot close.
And when you speak
- Expression écrite, three tasks
- 60 min
- Expression orale, with an examiner, 2 of them to prepare
- 12 min
The same errors follow you into the Expression orale, 12 minutes with an examiner including 2 of preparation, where they fly past before anyone can catch them. You cannot see a spoken mistake. All the more reason to write it down.
How to keep an error notebook by hand
You need a notebook and the corrections you already receive. The layout matters less than one rule: the notebook must make you produce the answer, not show it to you.
- 1One line per error, four columnsWhat you wrote, the correct form, the rule in your own words, and a fresh sentence of your own that uses the correct form. Copy the whole sentence you wrote, not just the faulty word.
- 2Label each error by typeGender, agreement, preposition, tense, word choice, spelling. Within a few weeks the labels will tell you where your practice should go, and it is rarely where you expected.
- 3Cover the right-hand columns and test yourselfRead what you wrote; produce the correction from memory. If this feels uncomfortable, good: that is the part that works.
- 4Come back after a gapThe next day, a few days later, a week or two after that. Anything you get wrong starts again.
- 5Call an error done only when it stops appearing in your new corrected textsGetting it right in the notebook is a step; not making it in a fresh text is the finish.
The weak point
I will be honest about the weak point of all this. The method is easy and the habit is hard.
A notebook kept by hand asks you to copy, label and schedule every error yourself, for months, alongside a job and a life and an exam to book. I suspect most handwritten notebooks die around the week life gets busy.
That is the one part I think software genuinely should carry.
What Salut Canada’s notebook holds
In Salut Canada the copying is done for you. Your errors from writing and speaking are collected on one page per section.
For listening and reading, each wrong answer on your result shows why it was wrong, and you can ask the tutor about any question.
Your study plan reads the same page.
From error to drill
The drills, called Renforcement ciblé, do the part of the hand method people skip: the testing. They turn your writing errors into exercises.
- correct a sentence
- fill a blank
- transform a sentence
- or compare two that differ on the point you got wrong
- each answer comes back explained at the level you are aiming for
What I like about this design is that it never hands you a correction to admire.
It asks you for the answer first.
That is the whole lesson of the research above, built into the screen.
Done means your next text
The finish is your next text.
If the same mistake turns up in a later correction, it becomes a new entry in your notebook and goes back into your drills.
So if « une problème » comes back in week ten, it is not a sign the method failed. It is the method catching it, eight weeks before an examiner would.
Honest limits
The notebook and the drills are practice feedback, not a verdict. Salut Canada is not France Éducation international, and only FEI marks your TCF.
And a single correct answer is not spacing. For the kind of memory the research describes, come back to your mastered errors a week or two later and test yourself again, by hand if need be.
Sources
- France Éducation international (FEI), TCF Canada page: the Expression écrite (three tasks, 60 minutes) and the Expression orale (three tasks, 12 minutes including 2 of preparation).
- Corder, S. P. (1967), “The significance of learners’ errors”, International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL), 5.
- Selinker, L. (1972), “Interlanguage”, International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL), 10.
- Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006), “Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention”, Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. & Rohrer, D. (2006), “Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis”, Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. & Willingham, D. T. (2013), “Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques”, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Metcalfe, J. (2017), “Learning from errors”, Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489.
- Van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H. & Kuiken, F. (2012), “Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error correction in second language writing”, Language Learning, 62(1), 1–41.
- Office québécois de la langue française, Banque de dépannage linguistique: “L’emprunt déconseillé faire du sens”.
Checked on 25 October 2026.