The dele scheme of work

Welcome! I'm excited to help you map out your preparation and conquer the DELE Spanish exam.

To make this scheme of work as personalized and effective as possible, let's start with a quick question: which specific DELE level are you planning to target, or are you looking for an overall comparison across all of them?

I am teaching year 10 A2-B1

Teaching Year 10 students working between A2 and B1 levels is a wonderfully dynamic zone, but designing a single scheme of work for both can feel like aiming at a moving target.

To keep your planning sharp, we will focus first on the structural differences of the exam they will actually sit. For students aged 11 to 17, the Instituto Cervantes offers a specific, highly tailored pathway called the instead of the standard adult exams.

One of the absolute best tools in your arsenal for a mixed-level Year 10 class is the DELE A2/B1 Escolar exam. Unlike typical exams where you must register for one strict level, this is a unique, dual-level "multilevel" paper. If a student performs at the A2 standard, they receive an A2 certificate; if they excel and meet the higher criteria, they are awarded a B1 certificate on the exact same exam.

Your path

Curriculum & Scheme of Work Structure

DELE Exam Task Types & Format

Teaching Strategies & Exam Preparation

To kick off our journey, I have mapped out our complete learning path above. Let's start by looking at exactly how the DELE Escolar differs from the adult general exam, and how its "safety net" grading works.

Continue to the differences between General and Escolar exams

Let's unpack how the DELE Escolar changes the game for your Year 10 students compared to the standard adult exams. While both versions award certificates with identical lifelong validity, the differences in context and theme make the Escolar much more approachable for teenagers.

The Teen Advantage: Context & Adaptation

The primary difference lies in the topic selection and communicative contexts. In a General DELE exam, candidates are expected to navigate adult scenarios: analyzing job advertisements, drafting formal complaints to a landlord, or discussing labor rights. For a 14-year-old, these concepts are not just linguistically challenging—they're completely foreign to their daily life.

Feature / Topic	General DELE (Adult)	DELE Escolar (Teens)
Target Age	18+ years old	11 to 17 years old
Writing Task Contexts	Professional emails, housing, job applications	School life, hobbies, family, future plans
Reading Text Sources	Newspaper editorials, business reports, contracts	Youth blogs, school diaries, magazine articles
Oral Prompts	Discussing economic trends or civic duties	Discussing weekend plans, school projects, or sports

By stripping away bureaucratic jargon, the Escolar exam lets your students focus entirely on showcasing their Spanish skills using familiar, age-appropriate themes. This reduces exam anxiety and aligns perfectly with standard secondary school like school life, family, and leisure time.

Create a scheme of work based on Gente Joven 2 and Dele Escolar a1-b2

I hear you, and integrating Gente Joven 2 directly with the DELE Escolar is the absolute best way to make your planning both efficient and highly effective.

To give you the exact layout that will save you hours of prep, let's address the question in our session guide: would you like a detailed, term-by-term scheme of work mapping specific units from Gente Joven 2 to their matching DELE Escolar exam tasks, or would you prefer to zoom out and look at the general structural framework of how they align first?

Let's look at the general structural framework first

Looking at the structural framework first is a brilliant move—it lets us see how the coursebook's DNA matches the exam's skeleton before we get bogged down in week-by-week details.

To integrate Gente Joven 2 with the DELE A2/B1 Escolar, we have to align how the textbook builds skills with how the exam actually tests them. The coursebook is structured around action-oriented projects, which fits perfectly with the DELE philosophy of assessing what students can actually do with the language rather than just what grammar rules they can memorize. Let's look at the basic macro-structure of how we bridge the two.

Gente Joven 2 Component	DELE Escolar Alignment	Pedagogical Focus for Year 10
Thematic Units (Contexts)	Reading & Listening Tasks	Transitioning from concrete school/home topics (A2) to expressing opinions (B1).
Proyectos (Action tasks)	Written & Oral Expression	Using unit vocabulary to complete real-world tasks, like writing a blog post or describing a photo.
Grammar & Lexicon	"Uso de la lengua" (Indirectly)	Building linguistic accuracy so errors don't impede communication in the productive papers.

Because the DELE Escolar is a , the structural framework of your scheme of work needs to serve two groups simultaneously. For your A2 target students, the focus is on describing their immediate environment, basic needs, and daily routines. For your B1 target students, we must stretch them to link ideas, narrate past events, and express future plans or personal opinions.

When we look at the structural framework of the exam itself, it is divided into two main blocks, each worth 50 points. To pass, students must achieve a minimum of 30 points in each block, meaning they cannot "save" a completely failed writing score with a perfect reading score. Let's look at how the points are distributed.

Block	Exam Papers	Maximum Points	Minimum Passing Score
Block 1 (Literacy)	Reading Comprehension + Written Expression	50 points	30 points
Block 2 (Oracy)	Listening Comprehension + Oral Expression	50 points	30 points

Now that we see this high-level division, we can design our scheme of work to explicitly target these two blocks. In practice, this means we will use Gente Joven 2's themes to build the receptive vocabulary needed for Block 1's reading, while using its project work to build the active production required for Block 2's speaking. Ready to see how we map the specific units to make this happen?