What You Should Know for the Citizenship Test

In order to become a citizen of the wonderful country of Canada you must have lived within its borders for at least four years in the past six and take a citizenship test as part of your application for citizenship. Not everyone has to take a citizenship test, in fact only people between the ages of 14 and 64 must take the test to prove their competency in their knowledge of Canada and mastery of language.

The language portion of the test is passive and practical in that there are no direct questions about the study of language itself. You won’t have to identify the nouns, pronouns, adjectives or verbs in a sentence. Instead you will simply demonstrate your proficiency in either French or English (the two official languages of Canada) to your immigration officer and by completing the other portion of the test.

The language portion will require you to be able to understand people speaking to you and then respond to these questions in a coherent way. The goal of this test is to ensure that you are able to communicate easily with English or French speakers in all of the different modes that may be used during the day. For example, can you tell a short explanatory story to relate how you got to the immigration office? Can you communicate whether or not you like something? Can you talk about your plans later in the evening? These are some of the questions you may be casually asked by the immigration officer in order to gauge your ability with either French or English.

You will also be tested regarding basic information having to do with the Canadian state. This is a subject that we have covered in a couple of other blogs one entitled Passing the Canadian Citizenship Test and another called Get to Know Canada.

We are fairly confident that if you have been living in Canada for at least three years that you are most likely very familiar with either English or French. Particularly English because without a pretty decent grasp of English you would not be reading this sentence!

Congratulations on your soon to be gotten citizenship certificate!