The 6 Themes Behind The VCE French Writing Prompts (And How To Use Them)

My story

I did a Bachelor of English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). And although I truly enjoyed it, writing essays was not my strength. But I was highly motivated and studied hard. After a particularly brutal five-hour essay exam and a very average result, I went to my teacher for feedback.

She invited me for a chat after class and showed me the best student's essay in the class — so I could see "the gap" and understand what to aim for. It was very well-intentioned. But also incredibly useless. That student's work was extraordinary. There was no world in which I could bridge that gap in one semester — or ever, honestly! (He is now an English Literature Professor, so fair enough.)

It was a frustrating experience that left me more lost than before. But as a teacher, I think about this experience often — because when students come to me struggling, I try hard to give them steps they can actually take. Not just "it doesn't flow nicely enough" or "your vocabulary isn't sophisticated." Those comments are true, but they don't give students anywhere concrete to go next.

Essay writing is hard... it is not a maths' equation. There is no single right answer, and there are many ways into a prompt. But there are absolutely things you can learn, practise, and get better at. So, if you are wondering what to do beyond practising past prompts, this post is a good place to start.

VCE French writing criteria: what examiners are looking for

Before diving into the six themes, it is worth understanding exactly what VCE examiners are looking for, because it shapes everything about how you should prepare. Broadly speaking, the two writing sections assess two key areas (I haven't divided the two writing sections here to keep things general, but you can find the specific criteria for each section in the official VCAA document):

• The first is the quality of your content: how relevant, comprehensive, and sophisticated your ideas are, and how well you structure and sequence them within and between paragraphs.

• The second is the quality of your language: the accuracy and range of your vocabulary and grammar, and how appropriately you use them for the context, purpose, audience, and text type.

  
  

Notice that both criteria reward range and sophistication, not just correctness. A response that is grammatically safe but narrow in its vocabulary will not score in the top band. What examiners want to see at the highest level is a broad range of sophisticated vocabulary, outstanding control of grammatical structures, and highly effective sequencing of ideas. In other words, you need to show that you can do a lot with the language (not just avoid mistakes).

This is what I like to call purposeful writing. Contrary to your English essays, where you already speak the language and your ideas and development of those ideas are crucial, in French you need to have the ideas but also frame them into sophisticated vocabulary and grammatical structures.

This is why building a strong vocabulary foundation matters so much. To borrow a quote I keep seeing in my nerdy books: "Without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." You cannot demonstrate original ideas or logical sequencing if you do not have the words to express them in the first place.

Among the many things you can work on, vocabulary is the most immediate and highest-impact place to start. This post is about exactly that: which vocabulary banks to build so that you are ready for any writing prompt.

The 6 themes behind every VCE French writing prompt

If you have ever sat down to prepare for the VCE French writing section and felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible topics, you are not alone. Every year brings a new set of prompts, and it can feel like anything could come up.

After analysing all writing prompts from past VCE French exams with the help of AI, I found that they all mostly fall into six recurring themes. Dig beneath the surface variety and the same topics come up again and again. For each prompt, you will need to draw on one or more of these six themes — which means you can target exactly what vocabulary to build in advance.

Here is what I found, and how you can use it to study smarter.

The 6 themes

1. People, relationships and personal qualities

Prompts in this theme ask you to reflect on friendships, chance encounters, and the qualities that make relationships meaningful. But this theme reaches further than the obvious prompts. If you are writing about a student exchange abroad, you will probably want a paragraph about meeting people and making friends. If you are running for class representative (2025 prompt), you need to talk about your interpersonal skills too. Vocabulary around people and relationships turns up everywhere.

Examples:

• 2020 (sample exam) — Journal intime: You are always amazed by your friend's support and encouragement; explain why this friendship matters so much

• 2021 — Journal intime: Reflect on a chance encounter that led to a great friendship

2. Going places and discovering cultures

Travel and cultural discovery appear in almost every exam year. You might be asked to recount a holiday experience, describe the atmosphere of a place, write about a student exchange, or reflect on what it feels like to move to a new country.

Examples:

• 2020 — Journal intime : You are about to move to Mayotte; describe how this move could influence your life

• 2023 — Lettre : Thank-you letter to your host family after a student exchange

• 2024 — Blog: Recount your holiday experiences in Tahiti for your travel blog

3. Roles, duties and contributing to society

A surprisingly consistent theme across all text types. From writing a speech as a candidate for class delegate, to emailing your parents about household chores, to describing your school's waste-reduction programme — prompts in this cluster all ask you to engage with the idea of shared responsibility and civic action.

Examples:

• 2021 — Article : Write an article informing residents about a new community club you want to create

• 2023 — Email informel (compulsory): Convince your parents to involve your younger sibling more in household chores

• 2025 — Discours (compulsory): Persuade your classmates to vote for you as class delegate

4. Eco-living, climate and the future

The environment and sustainability often go hand in hand with Theme 3 and many prompts touch on both. You need to be able to propose solutions, describe sustainable practices, and discuss the pros and cons of lifestyle choices in the context of young people and the planet's future.

Examples:

• 2020 — Discours : Argue that people should eat less meat and seafood

• 2023 — Discours : Inform students about ways to adopt a sustainable lifestyle

• 2025 — Blog : Describe your design for an ideal sustainable city

5. Screens, media and technology

Examiners return regularly to the question of how technology shapes young people's lives — mobile phones, social media, reading habits, advertising. This theme sits naturally in evaluative writing, asking you to weigh up advantages and disadvantages with nuance. And if I were making a prediction: with so much public debate around social media's effects on teenagers, minimum age laws, and AI's impact on study habits and mental health, this theme has plenty of material left to draw on!

Examples:

• 2020 — Article: Evaluate the opinion that mobile phones are useful but can become intrusive

• 2021 — Discours : Evaluate the influence of advertising on young people

• 2024 — Article: Evaluate the positive and negative effects of social media on teenagers

6. Stepping into adult life

Prompts here deal with part-time work, gap years, post-school decisions, and the experience of becoming independent for the first time.

Examples

• 2024 — Email informel: Invite and convince a French friend to spend a few weeks in Australia after their Baccalauréat

• 2025 — Email informel: Evaluate the positives and negatives of your part-time job and advise your cousin on whether to apply

How to build a VCE French vocabulary bank by theme

Armed with these six themes, here is what I recommend. For each theme, build a targeted vocabulary bank — not a long list of random words, but a curated selection of useful verbs, adjectives, idiomatic expressions, and key sentence structures. Learn them using active recall: flashcards, self-testing, writing sentences from memory. If you have never heard of active recall, read my other post on that topic first — it will change how you study everything, not just French.

The bottom line

The VCE French writing section is more predictable than it looks. The prompts change every year, but the territory they cover does not. Go in with strong, theme-specific vocabulary and a range of grammatical structures at your fingertips, and no prompt will catch you off guard.

Six themes. That is all you need to cover. Start there.

Want to go further?

If this post resonated with you, I run a three-month VCE French writing program designed around exactly this approach. Every weekday, you get a short quiz — Duolingo-style, a few minutes maximum — covering the vocabulary, grammatical structures, and key sentences I consider the highest-value ones to know before the exam. The program also includes two live workshops where we go deep into the writing sections together.

It is designed for students who are motivated, consistent, and want to give themselves one focused push in the months before the exam. If that sounds like you, create a free account and you will receive all the info by email in the next few weeks.