CELPIP Reading Correspondence: Part 1 Practice

Reading Correspondence is the official Paragon name for Part 1 of CELPIP Reading, and it is the largest single part: 11 of the 38 questions. You read one long personal letter, answer six drop-down questions about it, and then complete a five-blank reply written by the person it was addressed to. Ten minutes, and the clock does not carry over.

The letters are deliberately chatty. They bury what you need inside asides, and the reply half asks you to write as somebody else, which is a different skill from understanding the letter.

The letter on this test

Reading Test 11 opens with a letter to Nadege from a friend eleven months into parental leave in Regina. Sami turns one on the sixteenth of next month. There had been a list: get through the French course, repaint the hallway, finish one more thing. Almost nothing on it happened, and the letter is an honest account of why, written by somebody who says she has decided that if she does not write now she never will.

That shape is the point. The facts you are asked about are not announced; they arrive inside a sentence about something else. The dates, the list and the reason the year went differently are all there, and none of them is in a topic sentence.

The reply, which is scored differently from the letter

The second half of Part 1 is Nadege replying. Five blanks, each a drop-down. You are choosing what Nadege would write given what she has just read, so a word that is true of the letter can still be wrong in the reply if Nadege would not say it. Register matters here as well: the reply is between friends, so a formal option is usually a distractor rather than an answer.

How to work Part 1 in ten minutes

• Read the six questions before the letter. Knowing the year had a list on it turns a page of prose into a targeted search.
• Do not re-read the letter for the reply. By then you have the facts; what the reply needs is tone and consistency.
• Watch for a fact that is contradicted later in the same paragraph. Personal letters correct themselves, and the correction is the answer.
• Ten minutes covers both halves. Aim to be into the reply by minute six.
• A blank drop-down is a mark handed back. Nothing is deducted for a wrong choice.

The rest of Reading Test 11

Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram compares four childcare programs at the Wascana Community Centre: an Infant Room at $685 a month, a Toddler Half-Day at $410 that the provincial subsidy does not apply to, a Preschool Full-Day at $620 that runs through July and August, and an After-School Club at $265. Part 3, Reading for Information is a passage on zebra mussels in the Great Lakes and the cost they impose on anyone who draws water out of a lake. Part 4, Reading for Viewpoints reports on Kelowna, which struck single-family-only zoning from almost every residential lot and then found that what got built was not what the debate had been about.

CELPIP Reading format: where Part 1 sits

How Part 1 is scored

All 11 questions are worth one mark each and there is no penalty for a wrong answer. Part 1 alone is nearly thirty per cent of the reading section, which is why it is worth practising as itself rather than as a warm-up. The CELPIP reading score chart converts your raw score out of 38 into a CLB level.