What happens in the CIPLE speaking test?

A short face-to-face conversation, usually 10 to 15 minutes with one or two examiners. They ask about everyday ground: yourself, your family, your work, your city, your routine. You may be shown an image and asked to describe it. It is the lightest component at 25% of your grade, and usually the most forgiving.

Updated September 2026 · 2 min read

Why it is more forgiving than it feels

Speaking is the section candidates dread most, and the mismatch between that dread and the actual marking is large.

The examiners are trained to assess A2 speakers. They are not listening for fluency, range or elegance. They expect hesitation, a small vocabulary and simple sentence structures, because that is what A2 is. What they need to see is that you can communicate: understand a question, give a relevant answer, keep a short exchange going.

The one failure mode that matters

Freezing. Silence gives an examiner nothing to mark, and a grammatically imperfect answer is worth far more than no answer at all.

If you do not understand a question, say so. Pode repetir, por favor? is completely acceptable, and the examiners will rephrase. Using it is not a mark against you. Sitting in silence is.

Prepare the predictable ground

The topics are not a mystery. They are your life: where you are from, who you live with, what you do, what your day looks like, what you did at the weekend, what you like and dislike.

Rehearse two or three sentences on each of those out loud, with a real person if you can. Not a script to recite, just enough that the first sentence arrives without a search. Once you are talking, the rest follows much more easily.

Do not skip it because it is only 25%

The second pass rule, a minimum of 25% in every component, applies here too. Speaking is the lightest component by weight and it can still fail your whole exam on its own. Candidates who neglect it because the percentage looks small are the ones the floor rule catches.

We do not cover speaking. This is a reading tool, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Is the CIPLE exam in European or Brazilian Portuguese?

European Portuguese, throughout. The texts, the recordings and the examiners all use the European standard. Brazilian vocabulary and spelling cost real marks in reading and writing, and the accent difference is hardest in listening, where reduced vowels and faster rhythm can make a familiar phrase unrecognisable.

What is on the CIPLE listening test?

Short recordings in standard European Portuguese: dialogues, announcements and brief monologues, with questions about what you heard. Most items play twice. It runs about 30 minutes and is worth 30% of your grade, which is more than most candidates expect, and the accent is what catches Brazilian-Portuguese learners out.

What is the CIPLE exam and who runs it?

CIPLE stands for Certificado Inicial de Português Língua Estrangeira. It is the A2-level exam in the system run by CAPLE, the assessment centre at the University of Lisbon. A2 is the level most Portuguese citizenship applications require, which is why CIPLE is by far the most in-demand exam CAPLE offers.