Research notes

Gap 4: Which skill candidates miss, and how TEF and TCF compare for people who sat both

Prepared 4 November 2026 for a learner starting French from zero. The learner will sit TCF Canada or TEF Canada in late December 2026 and needs NCLC 7 in listening (CO), reading (CE), writing (EE) and speaking (EO).

Confidence tags

• [H] high: official text, or a source's own page read directly, for facts about that page.
• [M] medium: several sources agree, or a close reading of one source.
• [L] low: one unverified post or second-hand summary, or my own inference (labelled).

Forum thread titles are in italics. Everything else from forums and vendor pages is paraphrased.

0. Answers in brief

1. The public record I could reach is too thin to rank the skills with confidence.
   • I found 5 reports from 2024 to 2026 that name a skill below NCLC 7: 3 on TCF and 2 on TEF.
   • Three of the 5 are second-hand summaries, and one of the TEF reports gives no level.
   • No official body publishes score distributions by skill.
   • [H for the counts; L for any conclusion drawn from them]
2. TCF Canada:
   • Speaking was the skill below NCLC 7 in 2 reports, listening in 1, and reading and writing in none.
   • One speaking miss was 9/20, one mark short. The other was below B2, which means 9/20 or lower.
   • Three prep providers name listening as the TCF trap. None names another skill for TCF alone. [L]
3. TEF Canada (tests from 11 Dec 2023):
   • Speaking is the only skill named:
     • one candidate was retaking TEF because speaking was the weakest skill;
     • a second-hand report describes a speaking score lower than the candidate expected, with no level given.
   • Four providers name a TEF bottleneck (one of them for both tests). All four name speaking, and two also name writing.
   • No report of a TEF taken before 11 Dec 2023 gave a skill-level result. [L]
4. Comprehension data (one mock-test dataset, 2,091 scored sections, Sep 2025 to Sep 2026):
   • The dataset finds no skill that systematically holds candidates back. Listening was the lower of the two comprehension sections in 52.1% of TEF sittings and 49.4% of TCF sittings.
   • It does not publish writing or speaking results. [L–M]
5. Candidates who sat both tests: I found 0 paired per-skill score sets.
   • Two accounts say TCF was easier. One was seen only through an earlier search summary; the other is a husband reporting his wife's view.
   • One account, from the same earlier search summary, says TCF is hard for weak listeners.
   • One native English speaker missed the target on a TEF and then a TCF before passing TEF on a third try.
   • These accounts cannot show which test gives the higher NCLC in each skill. [L]
6. What it changes:
   • Nothing in these counts overturns the plan based on test structure: TCF as the primary test, and TEF as a hedge for listening (team report policy-retake-comparison.md §4.5–4.6).
   • The counts do warn against taking hours away from speaking: both TCF speaking misses were at 9/20 or just below it.
   • See §7. [L, inference]

1. Method and limits

Searches

• I ran no web searches. The first search call returned a notice that this turn's search budget was used up (200 calls, shared by every agent in the turn). I read only pages reached from known addresses or by following links.
• To finish this gap, the user can send a follow-up message to continue the search, or raise CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION. §8 lists the queries to run.

Sites I could not read

• Reddit (r/ImmigrationCanada, r/expressentry, r/French): not read. The fetch tool refuses reddit.com, and I did not use mirrors, proxies or archives.
• Facebook groups and YouTube comments: not reachable without search or a login. Not counted.
• FEI (France Éducation international): the site blocked my request with ERR-BOT-403 (FEI TCF Canada page) [H].

Sites I could read only in part

• CanadaVisa forum: thread pages come back empty (example), but each sub-forum's RSS feed is readable.
  • A feed lists the recently active threads, each with a truncated preview of its first post. Replies are not included.
  • What I read:
    • about 100 previews in the language-testing sub-forum;
    • about 70–80 previews in each of 20 other sub-forums, plus the all-forums feed.
  • Dates in a feed are last-activity dates, not posting dates.
• immigrer.com and pvtistes.net forums: readable, but their recent thread lists show no TEF or TCF results threads (immigrer Canada forum, pvtistes Entrée Express forum). The one immigrer thread used here, from 2021, came from an earlier team report. Members of both forums are mostly native French speakers.
• Vendor testimonials and reviews: I checked 16 testimonial and review pages and 2 site comment feeds. Only one page carried per-skill scores (Mes4C2, candidates in Cameroon).

How I counted

• A report is one candidate's own result, or a relative's, that names at least one skill.
• Second-hand means a third party's summary of a post I could not see.
• Opinions and provider claims are counted separately from reports.
• TEF results before and after 11 Dec 2023 are kept apart, using a post's test date or posting date where one is visible.

Files

• The fetch tool automatically cached one LFA PDF in its own results folder. I read its text in memory. I wrote no file other than this report.

2. Official statistics by skill: none published

Why this matters. The leading TEF countries are Canada and francophone countries, and the TCF vendors' testimonials (§4.5) also come from francophone candidates. Even if official distributions existed, they would mostly describe francophone candidates, not English-speaking beginners [M].

3. The one dataset with numbers (listening and reading only)

Source: mocko.ai statistics. Full-length mock tests on the platform, 11 Sep 2025 to 10 Sep 2026: 2,091 scored sections from 1,523 sittings (1,211 TEF, 312 TCF) by 693 candidates [H for the figures; L–M as evidence about the real tests].

What the platform itself concludes and admits:

• Neither section is the systematic blocker. It describes the TEF split as close to random.
• Candidates who miss on comprehension are usually one to two bands short on both sections.
• B2 or above is only a ceiling on the share reaching NCLC 7, because NCLC 7 starts at 458 (listening) and 453 (reading) on TCF and about 434 on TEF.
• Writing and speaking are withheld until six months after the platform's August–September 2026 change to its AI scoring.
• The sample is self-selected, many candidates are early in preparation, and the TCF groups are small.

4. Candidate reports, counted

4.1 TCF Canada, results reported 2024–2026

Outside the window: an immigrer.com post from 9 Feb 2021 gave CO 448, CE 472, EE 13 and EO 17. CO 448 is B2 but NCLC 6, so listening was below (thread) [H for the post].

Worry, no result: one candidate kept practising Task 3 essays until they reliably scored 12, to have a margin over 10/20 (thread, 20 Mar 2026).

4.2 TEF Canada, tests from 11 Dec 2023

Perception only, no result:

• A poster finds TEF reading very hard and asks for material (thread, Jun 2025).
• A summary notes that TEF listening advances automatically and that writing word counts are enforced (tcftefprep, Montréal, Mar 2026).

Dating: thread 854772 is newer than a thread describing a May 2024 test (thread 851919), and the summaries are from 2026. These tests were therefore most likely in the new format, although the test dates are not shown [M].

4.3 TEF Canada, tests before 11 Dec 2023

Dating: test dates are not shown. Both thread numbers are far lower than those of the 2024 threads, so the tests were most likely in the old format [L].

4.4 Tally of skill-level shortfalls (target NCLC 7)

• [H that these are all the reports I found; L as a picture of where candidates really fall short]
• Two of the TCF cases show a common trap: a comprehension score labelled B2 that may still be under NCLC 7. The 2021 CO 448 is B2 but NCLC 6, and "B2 in all four" cannot be counted either way (§4.1 #7).

4.5 In passing reports, which skill was closest to the line (TCF only)

No passing TEF report gave per-skill numbers.

CanadaVisa and tcftefprep posts

• #4: speaking exactly 10 [L].
• #6: one comprehension score (546) and one production score (15) at NCLC 9; the other two at NCLC 10 [H for the post].

Mes4C2 testimonials (Mes4C2):

• Gerardine: EE 13 (NCLC 8) was her lowest, with CO 547 (NCLC 9), CE 699 and EO 18.
• Dady Franklin: CO 547 (NCLC 9) was his lowest, with CE 699 and EE and EO 17.
• Mbihi: NCLC 10 in all four skills. His own label of NCLC 9 for EE 17 is wrong: IRCC puts 16–20 at NCLC 10.
• MKev: EE and EO at C1, CO and CE at C2.
• KUITCHE ALEX: CE and EE at C1, CO and EO at C2.

Across these 7 cases:

• writing was the lowest or joint-lowest skill in 3;
• speaking in 2;
• listening in 1;
• reading in 1;
• the other 2 were level across skills.

These candidates are francophone and the vendor chose the testimonials, so this says little about an English-speaking beginner [L].

5. Candidates who sat both tests

Result: 0 paired per-skill score sets.

• Of the 4 accounts with any view:
  • 2 lean TCF (#1a, #3);
  • 1 warns against TCF for weak listeners (#1a);
  • 1 passed on TEF after a TCF attempt (#2), which is confounded by extra study time.
• These accounts cannot show which test gives the higher NCLC in each skill [L].

6. What prep providers claim (no data cited)

Counts

• TEF: speaking 3, writing 1, listening and reading 0.
• TCF: listening 3, every other skill 0.
• Both tests together (tcftefprep): writing or speaking, 1.

A structural reading that fits these claims [L, my inference from the cut-offs in team report policy-retake-comparison.md §4.1]:

• On each test, the skill whose NCLC 7 cut-off sits highest inside B2 is the skill providers say candidates stall on: TCF listening at 458 (58% of the way up B2) and TEF speaking at 456 (56%).
• Each provider calibrates its own scale, so this is a pattern, not proof.

7. What this means for the course [L, inference]

1. Keep TCF Canada as the primary test.
   • Five public reports are too few to override the structure-based case (team report policy-retake-comparison.md §4.5–4.6).
   • What there is does not contradict it: TCF's reported misses fall in listening and speaking, and none in writing.
2. Make listening the largest single block, aimed at TCF questions 20–29.
   • The case for this:
     • the providers' consensus (3 of 3 who name a TCF skill);
     • one report;
     • the mock data, which put the lower comprehension section in listening about half the time.
3. Do not pay for listening by cutting speaking.
   • Two of the three TCF shortfall reports are speaking at 9/20 or below, and one of them is exactly 9. A third summary reports a pass with speaking exactly at 10.
   • FEI has suspended re-marking of writing and speaking for sessions from 1 Sep 2026, so a December 2026 mark is final (team report tcf-format-scoring.md, citing FEI and Concordia).
   • Train for 12/20 in speaking and writing, not 10, as one candidate did for writing (§4.1).
4. Treat a TEF sitting as a listening hedge only.
   • Book it if listening is the lowest skill in the full mock tests.
   • If speaking is the weakest skill, TEF adds little:
     • every TEF report that names a skill names speaking;
     • so do the three TEF-specific providers in §6;
     • TEF's speaking cut-off (456/699) sits in the upper half of B2 (LFA NCLC chart).
5. Let the learner's own mock results decide.
   • Five public reports cannot outweigh the learner's own full mocks.
   • Record the NCLC for each skill at every full mock. Move extra hours to whichever skill is lowest.
   • Make the TEF booking decision at the first full-mock checkpoint.

8. Searches to run with a fresh budget (to close this gap)

Reddit can be read only through search snippets, because the fetch tool blocks it. CanadaVisa thread replies can likewise be seen only in snippets.

1. site:reddit.com/r/ImmigrationCanada "TCF Canada" results listening (repeat with speaking, writing, reading)
2. site:reddit.com/r/expressentry "TEF Canada" NCLC results speaking
3. site:reddit.com/r/French "TCF Canada" results CO CE EE EO
4. reddit "took both" TEF TCF Canada scores
5. site:canadavisa.com "TCF Canada" results "CO" "CE" "EE" "EO"
6. site:canadavisa.com "TEF Canada" results "NCLC 6" (repeat with "CLB 6")
7. "résultats TCF Canada" "compréhension orale" "NCLC 6"
8. "TEF Canada" "expression orale" "NCLC 6" résultat
9. France Éducation international statistiques TCF répartition niveaux par épreuve
10. CCI Paris TEF statistiques résultats par épreuve
11. TEF vs TCF which is easier on YouTube, for comment snippets

Count rule for the rerun:

• One row per candidate, with test, test month, the four scores and the NCLC of each.
• Keep TEF tests before and after 11 Dec 2023 apart.
• Keep second-hand summaries in their own column.

Sources

Official

• IRCC conversion tables (modified 2026-10-16): https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/documents/language-requirements/language-testing.html
• LFA, 2025 key figures: https://www.lefrancaisdesaffaires.fr/les-chiffres-cles-2025/ and PDF https://www.lefrancaisdesaffaires.fr/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2025-chiffres-cles-fda.pdf
• LFA NCLC chart: https://www.lefrancaisdesaffaires.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/correspondance-tef-nclc.pdf
• FEI TCF Canada page (blocked, ERR-BOT-403): https://www.france-education-international.fr/test/tcf-canada?langue=fr

Dataset

• mocko.ai TEF and TCF statistics: https://mocko.ai/tef-tcf-statistics

CanadaVisa RSS feeds read

• Language testing (forum 53): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/53/index.rss
• Express Entry (54): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/express-entry-expression-of-interest.54/index.rss
• Skilled Worker (4): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/skilled-worker-professional-immigration.4/index.rss
• Foreign Workers (10): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/10/index.rss
• Canadian Experience Class (52): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/canadian-experience-class.52/index.rss
• Provincial Nominee Program (6): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/provincial-nomination-program-immigration.6/index.rss
• General (13): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/general-all-canadian-immigration.13/index.rss
• Quebec (55): https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/quebec-immigration.55/index.rss
• All forums: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/forums/-/index.rss
• Forums 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 41, 57, 58 and 59 (business, visa offices, jobs, education, residence): no French-test results.

CanadaVisa threads cited (read through their RSS previews)

• 852932: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tcf-reevaluation.852932/
• 854772: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tef.854772/
• 851919: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tcf-canada-digital-certificate-no-candidate-signature-or-paper-copy.851919/
• 863973: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tef.863973/
• 874290: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/i%E2%80%99m-wondering-if-gemini%E2%80%99s-score-is-reliable-for-my-tcf-canada-task%E2%80%AF3-essay.874290/
• 878544: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/fsw-feb-2026-aor.878544/
• 879622: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/applying-for-fsw-while-inside-canada-on-a-pgwp.879622/
• 883080: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/pnp-or-french.883080/
• 883051: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/accept-pnp-nomination-or-french.883051/
• 883175: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/no-ita-despite-the-draw.883175/
• 729444: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/my-experience-with-tef-canada-and-tcf-canada-and-what-i-make-of-it-please-share.729444/
• 665998: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/i-passed-tef-its-possible.665998/
• 722777: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tef-a-complete-guide-to-score-c1-in-writing-section.722777/
• 767802: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tcf-french-exam.767802/
• 875280: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/tef-tcf-which-is-easy.875280/

Other candidate material

• tcftefprep exam-centre experiences (8 summaries of public posts, Feb–May 2026, which the site says it gathered from Reddit and other forums; no links): https://www.tcftefprep.com/exam-centres/experiences
• Mes4C2 testimonials: https://www.mes4c2-tcfcanada.com/
• immigrer.com TCF thread (2021): https://forum.immigrer.com/topic/172845-immigration-canada-test-tcf-canada/

Prep-provider claims

• https://www.tcftefprep.com/blog/tef-canada-tcf-canada-results-2026
• https://frenchforpr.com/how-to-get-clb-7-tef-canada/
• https://horizonfranco.com/tef-canada-score-nclc-7/
• https://mocko.ai/blog/stuck-at-clb-5-tef-speaking
• https://www.prepmyfrench.com/blogs/tcf-canada-listening-rfi-audio-speed-strategies
• https://hitcf.com/en/guide/tcf-listening
• https://www.tcfcanada.ai/en/guide/listening-tips
• https://www.tcfcanada.ai/en/guide/tcf-vs-tef (no candidate data)
• https://www.tcf-canada-formation.com/en/newsletter/2026-08-24-ce-difficulte-croissante-ou-tu-decroches (no candidate data)

Checked, no per-skill results

• https://frenchforpr.com/
• https://frenchforpr.com/our-reviews/
• https://learnfrenchwithalexa.com/
• https://learnfrenchwithalexa.com/testimonials
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/learnfrenchwithalexa.com
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mocko.ai
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tcftefprep.com
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/speakduo.com
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/languagenext.com
• https://www.tcftefprep.com/
• https://www.tcftefprep.com/reviews
• https://tefcanadaonline.com/
• https://francaisprep.com/
• https://www.speakduo.com/
• https://www.languagenext.com/
• WordPress comment feeds of https://tcf-canada.ca/ and https://www.tcfca.com/

Team reports in this folder

• policy-retake-comparison.md (§4.1 cut-offs, §4.4 opinions, §4.5–4.6 verdict)
• tcf-format-scoring.md (re-marking suspension)
• exam-analysis.md (source S56)