Speaking to B2

You can hold a two-hour dinner conversation in French. Now speak alone, without interruption, for five minutes, on faut-il interdire les voitures en centre-ville — and notice what happens at about ninety seconds, when the first thing you wanted to say has been said and nobody is going to ask you a question to move things along. Conversation supplies structure for free: your interlocutor's turns are the skeleton. A monologue suivi takes that away, and what is left is whether you can build the skeleton yourself.

That is what this track trains, and it trains it by length. The monologue starts at ninety seconds with a three-part structure, and grows in steps — two minutes with two arguments each carrying an example, two and a half with connectors chaining them, three with the concession that is the single clearest B2 marker, then nuance and register, examples with depth instead of lists, anticipating the counter-argument, and finally the full five-minute exposé at exam length. Each recording is scored on delivery and against the B2 rubric the examiner uses: task, coherence, range, accuracy, register. The growth is deliberate, because the failure at five minutes is never the last thirty seconds — it is a structure that was too thin at ninety.

The second half is the débat, where the examiner pushes back and the skills stop being compositional. Six moves are drilled separately: defend a position, concede without surrendering it, rebut with method, negotiate a compromise, clarify or reformulate when challenged, and conclude. Then all of it under exam conditions in the épreuves blanches, and afterwards the maintenance protocols — a weekly two-minute voice note, shadowing — because oral fluency is the axis that decays fastest once you stop.