New Eiken test tasks in 2024

Back in 2021, another blogger here on City Cost asked how to prepare children for the Eiken, a widely used measure of English proficiency in Japan’s schools. You can read this overview of the test and how to support English learners to meet the test’s levels.

The new Eiken e-mail task in 2024  (original image via Canva)

Updates to the test in 2024

In the first of three rounds of testing in 2024, some of the levels have new test sections that may change how parents advise their children and teachers coach their students. I teach at a private high school where my students were worried about their performance on the first stage, the paper test, that they took in June this year. The good news is that many passed so they could go on to the second stage, the interview test. To get ready, we worked through recent Eiken tests including the new test formats followed by mock interviews with their classmates.

The details of the changes are available from the website in English, but here’s a summary. Essentially, the Grade 3 to Pre-2 levels have an additional writing task, and the 2 to 1 levels have an additional summary task.

The good news

The junior high school learners I teach did well on the additional writing task because they have good grammar and expression foundations. The test prompts have clear instructions that indicate the goals. The students easily responded to the question in the e-mail prompt and produced two follow-up questions to meet the word count.

Not bad news, but challenging

For the levels above 2, an entirely different skill is required. The challenge is to produce a comprehensible summary using synonymous terms. This requires practice. If you’re coaching your own children or students, help them identify essential information and assist them in paraphrasing. For advice on how to write paraphrases and summaries, I suggest you and the learners study the Eiken writing advice from Kikokushijo Academy, an education provider with a great track record of assisting Japanese children educated abroad.

Did your children or students have a go at the new Eiken test in June 2024? How did they fare?