The international ECL examination system provides a standardised test-system customised to the languages of the EU member states and the EU candidate countries. The test-system is based on the recommendations of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and is operated by the European Consortium for the Certificate of Attainment in Modern Languages (ECL).

 

GENERAL INFORMATION ON THE ECL LANGUAGE EXAM

• The ECL language examination system offers monolingual tests. It is designed to test the candidates' oral and written skills in various everyday situations as well as in professional/work-related and personal/private situations.

• As part of the ECL testing four skills are tested: oral communication, listening comprehension, written communication and reading comprehension.

• The development of tests in all 15 languages is subject to strict quality standards to ensure that the various tests are reliable, valid and comparable.

• An ECL exam can be taken in the following languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak.

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LEVELS

The ECL language exam can be taken on four levels and it measures primarily the communicative language competences of candidates. The requirements at the different levels are adapted to the recommendations of the Common European Framework:

 

A2 – Waystage

B1 – Threshold

B2 – Vantage

C1 – Effective Operational Proficiency

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EXAMINATION COMPONENTS

The peculiarity of the ECL testing is that it does not include grammar tests or translation tasks. The structure of the test is the same on all four levels. The oral exam consists of two parts in which "oral communication" and "listening" skills are assessed. As part of the written part of the examination "written communication" and "reading comprehension" skills are tested. Each skill is tested by two tasks.