Lessons for World Language Teachers from the 2024 AP Exam

Things you should keep in mind as you prepare students for 2025.

During my eight years as an AP French instructor, I did a lot of PD. I went to AP Institutes, read everything posted to my AP French instructor Facebook group, and purchased all the third-party test prep books I could find.

But hands down, the most valuable AP professional development I ever had was being an AP reader in 2017 and 2020. I took what I learned from scoring 500 cultural comparisons and 100 conversation tasks to my classroom, and I saw my students' exam scores rise significantly afterward. 

You don’t have to be an AP reader to learn from the insights readers gained as they scored the 2024 AP exams. In October, the Chief Readers of each AP language exam released their annual reports summarizing notable trends and observations. The reports are lengthy but chock-full of valuable information and suggestions for instruction. 

While it’s understandable that these reports take some time to compile, an October release makes it challenging for teachers to carve out the time to read through them—much less implement their suggestions. I know you're busy enough just making it to winter break (maybe looking for some grab-and-go winter-themed activities?), so I read the 2024 world language reports so you don’t have to. Here’s everything you need to know.

High-level takeaways for all languages

While the AP world language exams vary slightly from language to language, the six Chief Reader Reports I reviewed contained some notable takeaways for all. 

Familiarity with the task

Chief readers mention this every year, but it remains true: some AP language students do not seem familiar with the exam tasks. The chief readers recommend reviewing each task’s instructions (and rubrics!) multiple times with your students so they understand precisely what they should do when they open their test booklets on exam day.  

Additionally, the chief readers recommend having students practice exam components by writing out free responses in pen with the same time constraints they’ll have on the day of the AP test.

The AP German Chief Reader, Burkhard Henke, also surmised that proctors lack some crucial familiarity with the exam format, noting that several students erroneously paused their recordings during the conversation task. They should record the entire task, including each of the conversation prompts.

The writing process

We may be world language teachers, but we share the responsibility of teaching students how to write. The 2024 chief readers stressed handwriting legibility and students’ understanding of the writing process need more attention in AP language classes. 

In particular, the chief readers pointed out that students seem to be struggling with the following:

• Summarizing vs. integrating sources
• Paraphrasing vs. quoting sources
• Clear thesis statements
• Organizing essays with an introduction, body, and conclusion
• Responding to all parts of a prompt

Paraphrasing sources was highlighted as a particularly important skill, as it helps students more naturally integrate them into their writing rather than simply summarizing them. 

Memorized phrases vs. spontaneous speech

Several chief readers cautioned against overreliance on memorized or “starter” phrases, noting that some students cut into their own response time on speaking tasks by using clearly rehearsed speech. While memorized phrases can provide proper framing, spontaneous speech is the basis for task scores and should be prioritized. 

Students should be given opportunities to create spontaneous speech starting in the lower levels, and the chief readers recommend explicitly teaching interpersonal communication strategies, like asking for clarification or requesting additional information. 

Students should participate in the interpersonal speaking task as “fully as possible” and avoid overly brief responses. To facilitate their full participation, the AP French Chief Reader, John Moran, suggests that teachers help students “develop a good feeling for how long 20 seconds last.”

Email reply register

The chief readers for AP Spanish Language, AP French, AP Italian, and AP German said the same thing about the email reply: students struggle with maintaining a formal register. Even if students start out their reply by addressing their correspondent formally, they often fall back on informal subject pronouns or refer to their correspondent by their first name. This was particularly prevalent on the German exam this year. 

All of the chief readers recommend starting email reply tasks in the lower levels of the target language and stressing consistency in register. 

Cultural comparison organization

The chief readers recommend that students begin cultural comparisons by addressing the target language community rather than their own. Students who begin by addressing their own community often run out of time before they can adequately treat the target language community. 

Exam-specific takeaways

Beyond the suggestions already outlined, each chief reader’s report offered language-specific insights to help you better prepare your students for the 2025 AP Exam. 

AP Chinese Language and Culture

• Some students did not address all four pictures in the story narration task, therefore failing to tell a complete story.
• There was a new concern among readers that some students did not use punctuation correctly.
• Incorrect keyboard inputting continued to be a troubling issue. For example, 裙子 (dress) was the keyword for the story narration, but many students failed to type out these two characters. Readers counted close to 100 different versions of dress, such as 君子, 长转, 蠢字, 妻子, 肠子.
• In the cultural presentation task, students relied too much on memorized phrases or sentence starters, and many went off-topic. 
• Not enough students understood the desired structure of the cultural presentation.
• The chief reader report suggests teaching students expressions that help them talk about cultural significance. Provided examples include: 表达, 象征, 代表, ... 的重要性表现在 ..., 让 …了解到/体验到, 为了..., 教人们, 提醒我们 ..., 寓意着, 传承了..., and 意义是.

AP French Language and Culture

• In the email reply task, some students confused matières with matériaux, leading some students to write about school supplies rather than subjects.
• Some students switched to an informal register (e.g., "je suis vachement excité") in their effort to use idiomatic expressions.
• Some students use overly long closings. A simple “Cordialement” or “Bien cordialement” is sufficient.
• In Source 3 of the argumentative essay, some students conflated the French word gratuit with the English word “gratuity,” which led some students to talk about tipping culture.
• Some students did not clearly identify the sources they were attempting to integrate.
• For the conversation task, some students conflated the fête in prompts 2 and 3 with the réunion in prompts 5.
• Some students switched between tu and vous.
• For the cultural comparison, some students missed the question about the role of food and ended up merely identifying different foods.
• Some students relied on stereotypes and generalizations, for example: all French people eat baguettes, or all African nations are poor.

AP German Language and Culture

• In the email task, students struggled with the term Werbung despite the provided context clue. This prevented some from fully responding to the second bullet point in the email. 
• Some students struggled to understand Source 2 and Source 3 of the argumentative essay task. 
• For the conversation task, many students seemed to anticipate the question Wie geht’s? and offered a response, ignoring the actual question.
• Additionally, some misunderstood ausleihen and seemed to hear Ausland, which negatively impacted their response. 
• For the cultural comparison, many students simply listed individual artists or films without explaining their importance.

AP Italian Language and Culture

• In the email task, many students struggled with gender and number agreement, subject-verb agreement, spelling, and accent marks. 
• In the argumentative essay task, there was a general lack of grammatical accuracy and frequent interference from Spanish and English. 
• Some students confused the professor interviewed in Source #3 with the name of his department (referring to him as “Guglielmo Marconi” instead of Alberto Bellini).
• During the conversation, some students misinterpreted the first prompt as an invitation rather than a question. 
• Students erroneously answered in the affirmative for the second conversation prompt despite being instructed to answer negatively.
• A significant number of students did not respond to the third prompt.

AP Spanish Language and Culture

• For the email reply, some students misunderstood the verb animar.
• Some students struggled to interpret Source 2 in the argumentative essay task, leading to erroneous assertions about its content.
• In the conversation task, some students failed to identify a Spanish-speaking country in response to the first prompt. 
• Some students could not identify the urgency of completing the project and recommended longer-range timeframes. 
• In the cultural comparison, some students misinterpreted the word papel in the prompt for paper and compared things used in celebrations that are made of paper (like piñatas).

AP Spanish Literature and Culture

• In the text explanation task, many students incorrectly identified or confused the period, author, literary movement, or technique.
• In the text and art comparison task, many students confused modernismo with modernity or modernization processes.
• Many students also confused the United States with Spanish America and/or Rubén Darío with José Martí.
• Some students erroneously believed that this task required an essay-length response. This likely ate into the time they should have spent on other free-response questions and did not earn them additional points.
• In the analysis of a single text, some students conflated metafiction and fiction. 
• Some students misidentified the narrative voice, characters, author, and literary device.
• In the text comparison task, some students did not understand the vocabulary in Hombre de ciudad.

How do I use this information?

While some of the information in the Chief Reader Reports is specific to the prompts on the 2024 exams, the reports do offer helpful guidance in preparing students for the 2025 AP Exams. Making sure students fully understand the layout and purpose of a task, for example, can help them avoid common pitfalls like only addressing part of a prompt or not answering every question asked in an email. 

Encouraging students to work on the legibility of their writing or the accuracy of their typing skills can also be valuable skill sets to focus on before exam day. When it comes to specific vocabulary, try to identify words that look similar but mean something different (a homograph), so students learn to spend an extra second deciphering vocabulary on the test. 

You're not in this alone

While preparing students for the AP Exam can feel challenging, remember that you’re not in this alone. There are many high-quality resources to help you effectively scaffold for the AP exam, starting in Level 1. 

Want to learn more about vertically aligning your language curriculum to foster AP skills? Check out our comprehensive world language curricula for Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese.