🎓 Bilingual Matura Exam in English – Key Information
The bilingual Matura exam is the most advanced variant of the foreign language maturity exam in Poland. It is primarily aimed at graduates of bilingual departments, but any student who feels up to the task can take it.
- Difficulty Level (CEFR): The exam verifies language proficiency at level C1 (Advanced), and in terms of understanding written and listening texts, it often touches on level C2 (Proficiency).
- Duration (Written Exam): 150 minutes.
- Prestige and Recruitment: The result of the bilingual Matura exam holds great weight during recruitment to top Polish and foreign universities. Higher education institutions often apply very favorable conversion rates for this exam (e.g., the result multiplied by 1.33 or 1.5 compared to the extended level).
📝 Written Exam Structure
The exam paper is designed to test the candidate’s proficiency across 4 different areas:
1. Listening Comprehension (Listening)
The recordings are authentic, speakers use various accents (British, American, Scottish, Australian), and the speech tempo is natural (fast). The student must not only pick out specific information but also understand intentions, irony, or the author’s hidden message.
- Task Types: Multiple-choice questions, matching statements to speakers, filling in gaps in sentences (based on the recording).
2. Reading Comprehension (Reading)
Texts at the bilingual level are usually complex scientific articles, journalistic pieces, or fragments of classic/modern English literature. They contain rare vocabulary, archaisms, and advanced idioms.
- Task Types: Multiple choice, matching headings, arranging missing paragraphs (Gapped Text).
3. Use of English – The most difficult part!
This is where examiners check the student’s „technical” precision. Absolute, one hundred percent grammatical and spelling correctness is required (a typo means losing a point).
- Task Types:
- Key Word Transformations (Paraphrases): Transforming a sentence using a given word while maintaining the original meaning.
- Word Formation: Creating new words (often with negative prefixes, e.g., undeniable, incomprehensible) from words given in parentheses.
- Open Cloze: Completing a text with missing grammatical words (prepositions, pronouns, operators) – without any options to choose from.
- Partial Translation: Translate fragments of sentences from Polish into English so that they fit the rest of the sentence.
4. Written Production (Writing)
The student must write a text of 300–350 words. Topics require maturity, argumentation skills, and a rich lexical and grammatical arsenal (e.g., stylistic inversion, conditional moods, emphatic structures).
- Forms: Usually, there are two forms to choose from: an Essay with elements such as evaluating/proposing solutions or a Journalistic Article.
🗣️ Oral Exam
The oral part at the bilingual level lasts approximately 15 minutes and resembles a conversation with a native speaker or an advanced academic debate in form.
- Warm-up conversation: A short conversation on general topics (education, future plans, passions).
- Task based on a text: The student reads a short text in English, recounts its content, and answers detailed questions from the examiner. The ability to defend one’s opinion and refer to the ideas contained in the article is required.
- Task based on illustrations (2 pictures): Comparing and contrasting two photographs and answering two related questions (often philosophical or abstract in nature).
💡 How does the Bilingual Matura differ from the Extended Matura?
Many people wonder what distinguishes these two exams. The main differences are:
- Use of English: In the extended exam, grammar is standard (tenses, passive voice). In the bilingual exam, exceptions, inversions, rare phrasal verbs, and difficult collocations are verified.
- Vocabulary: The vocabulary threshold is approximately 8,000 – 10,000 words. Texts are riddled with idioms.
- Word limit (Writing): In the extended exam, we write 200-250 words; in the bilingual exam: 300-350 words, which requires significantly longer concentration and better text planning.
- Audience: The written statement must be maintained in a very formal, academic tone (unless the article prompt suggests otherwise).