“My level is good, I speak well, but Use of English drags my score down.” I hear this in almost every first lesson of B2 First preparation. It makes sense: Reading and Use of English carries a quarter of the final score, like the other three papers (Writing, Listening, Speaking), but it is the only one of the four where “knowing English” is not enough. You have to know the format, because the format trains one precise skill: recognising structures, not guessing them.
The first four parts of this paper are the Use of English proper (Parts 5-7 are reading comprehension, a different story). I will explain how they work, where Italian students almost always go wrong, and how I build a four-week plan to take a student from an unbalanced score to a solid one.
How the score is calculated
B2 First has four papers with equal weight: Reading and Use of English, Writing, Listening and Speaking are each worth 25% of the final score. Inside Reading and Use of English there are seven parts: the first four are Use of English (grammar and vocabulary), the last three are Reading proper (reading comprehension). The paper’s total score is spread over all seven, so the four Use of English parts on their own weigh roughly an eighth of the overall score. That is less than it feels like when you are panicking, but enough to move a candidate from a grade B to a grade A or the other way round.
The certificate starts at 160 on the Cambridge English Scale; 173-179 is grade B, 180-190 is grade A (which also certifies C1 level). A weak Use of English does not sink the exam by itself, but it is almost always the paper where you win or lose the margin between “pass” and “pass well”.
The four parts, one by one
Part 1 — Multiple-choice cloze
A text with 8 gaps, each with 4 word options. It is never a matter of general meaning: the options often have very similar meanings, and the right answer depends on collocations (which words go together by habit, not by logic) or on fixed expressions.
Typical Italian mistake: choosing the word that “feels right” because you translate it mentally from Italian. Example: faced with “make/do/have/take a decision”, many Italian students hesitate because in Italian it is prendere una decisione (“to take a decision”), and “take” seems the obvious choice. Here it is also the correct one, but only by chance. The real problem appears with collocations where Italian suggests the wrong word, such as “do a mistake” instead of “make a mistake” (because in Italian you fare un errore, literally “do a mistake”).
Part 2 — Open cloze
A text with 8 gaps, this time with no options: you have to write the right word from scratch. This part is purely grammatical — articles, prepositions, relative pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries, verb forms.
Typical Italian mistake: leaving out the article where English always requires it (Italian sometimes omits it, English almost never does — “in the morning”, not “in morning”), or getting the fixed preposition of a verb or adjective wrong (“interested in”, not “interested about”, a calque from the Italian interessato a/di).
Part 3 — Word formation
A text with 8 gaps, each next to a base word in capitals that has to be transformed into the correct grammatical form: from verb to noun, from adjective to adverb, often by adding a negative prefix.
Typical Italian mistake: using the wrong negative prefix. English has no single rule like the Italian “in-”: it is “unhappy” but “impossible”, “irregular” but “disagree” — every word has its own historical prefix, and you have to learn it by heart, not deduce it from a rule.
Part 4 — Key word transformation
6 sentences to complete: you are given a sentence and a key word (which you cannot change), and you have to write a second sentence with the same meaning, using between 2 and 5 words that include the key word.
Typical Italian mistake: keeping too many words from the original sentence instead of really rephrasing the structure, or going over the word limit (a contracted form like “don’t” counts as two words). It is the part seen as the hardest because it requires knowing fixed structures by heart (for example “no sooner… than”, “the last time”, “wish + past perfect”), not just vocabulary.
Eight worked examples
Part 1. “The company decided to ___ a new strategy to increase sales.” (a) do (b) make (c) adopt (d) take → (c) adopt — “adopt a strategy” is the correct collocation; “make/take a strategy” do not exist as fixed expressions, even though “make a decision” and “take a decision” do (the trap is precisely that verbs get mixed up between different collocations).
Part 1. “She has always been very ___ of other people’s feelings.” (a) conscious (b) considerate (c) careful (d) sensible → (b) considerate — “considerate of” is the collocation for “thoughtful towards”; “sensible” is a classic false friend (it means sensato, “sensible” in the sense of sound judgement, not sensibile — that one is “sensitive”).
Part 2. “I’ve been working here since ___ was seventeen years old.” → I — the subject pronoun is required after “since”, and it is often left out by those who think in Italian (da quando avevo diciassette anni does not repeat the subject).
Part 2. “He apologised ___ being late for the meeting.” → for — “apologise for doing something”, a fixed preposition after the verb; the Italian chiedere scusa di/per does not help you predict which preposition is needed.
Part 3. _CARE → “The nurse looked after the patient with great __.” → care (a noun: no visible morphological change is needed, but you must recognise the grammatical role — here you need the noun, not the verb).
Part 3. POSSIBLE → “It is ___ to finish the project by Friday.” → impossible — prefix “im-” (not “un-” or “in-”), one of the cases where the Italian mistake is most frequent: the Italian impossibile uses the same prefix, but the student replaces it anyway out of excess caution with “un-”, the “default” prefix learnt first.
Part 4. “I haven’t seen my cousin for five years.” (LAST) → The last time I saw my cousin was five years ago. — a fixed structure with “the last time”, with the tense changing from present perfect to past simple.
Part 4. “It’s possible that they missed the train.” (MAY) → They may have missed the train. — modal + present perfect (not “may missed” nor “may have miss”), one of the most frequently failed transformations because it requires remembering the modal + perfect infinitive form by heart, not translating.
A four-week plan
Week 1 — diagnosis and Parts 1-2. One full Reading and Use of English paper, timed, to see where points are really lost (often not where the student thinks). Then targeted work on recurring collocations (Part 1) and on fixed prepositions and articles (Part 2), with short lists repeated several times rather than long lists seen only once.
Week 2 — Part 3, word families. Building “word families” (happy / unhappy / happiness / happily) for the topics that recur in the exam — environment, technology, work, education — and drills on negative prefixes, which are the most frequent mistake and the easiest to fix with repeated practice.
Week 3 — Part 4, fixed structures. A list of the grammatical transformations that come up most often (conditionals, modals + perfect infinitive, reported speech, passive forms, “wish”/“if only”, inversions with “no sooner”/“hardly”), learnt as blocks, not re-derived from scratch every time.
Week 4 — timed paper and targeted review. Two full papers, a few days apart, corrected together line by line. At this stage no new grammar is introduced: you consolidate what you have covered, because close to the exam new material confuses more than it helps.
This is not the same as choosing between B2 First and DELF
If your doubt is which certificate to take — B2 First in English, DELF B2 in French, or both in the same year — that is a different discussion, and it is the one I tackle in B2 First or DELF B2: which to take. This post starts from a different point: you have already decided to take B2 First, and you want to know how to really beat the part of the Reading and Use of English paper that scares people most.
How we work
In lessons, Use of English is best trained in two stages: at home the student does targeted exercises for each part (collocations, prepositions, word formation, key word transformation), and in the lesson we correct together and explain the why of every mistake. Knowing the answer was wrong is not enough; you need to understand the rule or the collocation behind it, otherwise the same mistake comes back in the next paper with different words.
If you are not yet sure that B2 First is the right exam, I compared the two most requested exams in the post on IELTS or Cambridge. For reading and writing under time pressure, try the second paper of the maturità (Italy’s school-leaving exam) in English; for writing a structured commentary on a text, there is the post on the commentary of a literary text in English.
Lessons are online, one to one: for up-to-date rates (single lesson or 10-hour package) see the pricing page. Payment is offline, after the lesson. If you want to see how the English lessons are organised, the English language page describes them in detail, and for a second opinion on your starting level you can write to me from the contact page: the first chat is free.
