The US citizenship test is complicated for those who don’t speak English and here are the changes

Learning English or improving and improving levels to master it is an idea that should be nurtured as they determine whether the citizenship test in the United States will bring changes in 2024, and one of them is that: see their development when they express themselves in that language.

At Univisión, they recall that “federal law requires applicants for citizenship to demonstrate an understanding of English – including how to speak, read and write commonly used words – and that they know the history of the United States and how the government is constituted .”

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The USCIS, Telemundo News reports, is planning “reforms to the test used for permanent residents to naturalize as Americans. The redesign includes evaluating the applicants’ English with questions that cannot be memorized.”

New US citizenship requirement

The same information chain that the Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) states that “the new exam adds a section of oral expression to evaluate English language proficiency.”

What would the test be like?

They explain that “an official would show pictures of current situations -such as daily activities, the weather or food- and would ask the applicant to verbally describe the images”.

In the current test, “during the naturalization interview, a civil servant tests speaking skills by asking personal questions that the applicant has already answered in the naturalization process.”

People who already have US citizenship think that “the new part of oral expression could increase stress that applicants already feel during the exam.”

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Changes in the citizenship education test

Another aspect that would change is the civics section on the history and government of the United States so that it would be “multiple choice questions rather than the current short oral answer format”.

To have an approximation of the change that can be approved, they explain it in Univisión and in the AP bureau as follows:

“In a question on the current citizenship test, an officer asks the applicant to name a war in which the United States was involved in the 20th century.

The applicant must answer only one of five acceptable options: World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, or Gulf War.”

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What does the proposed multiple choice format look like?

With the change, it is expected that “the requester would read the question and choose the correct answer from the following options:

A. Civil War

B. Mexican-American War

C. Korean War

D. Spanish-American War”.

The person “must know the five wars the United States participated in in the 20th century to choose the only correct answer,” says Bill Bliss, author of a book on citizenship in Massachusetts.

This requires a “significantly higher level of language proficiency and testing ability”.

The changes made by the USCIS will require you to show more fluency in expressing yourself in English and remember that the most important thing is to prepare well and “nothing will happen” if the candidate does not pass .

Telemundo when citing the lawyer Alma Rosa Nieto

To date, “the applicant must correctly answer six out of ten citizenship education questions to pass. Those 10 questions are selected from a bank of 100 civic education questions.

For Mechelle Perrott, San Diego’s citizenship coordinator, “It’s harder to learn to read and write if you don’t know how to do it in your first language. That’s my concern about the multiple choice test; It’s a lot of reading.”