Secondary 1 and 2 oral exams: what should you expect?

Is there a national oral exam in Secondary 1 or 2?

No. SEAB runs Singapore's national examinations: the PSLE at the end of primary school, the GCE N-Level and O-Level, and it has published syllabuses for the Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) examinations from 2027. In SEAB's 2026 registration rules, none of them is sat in Secondary 1 or 2.

That is a claim about an absence, so here is what it rests on. SEAB's registration information for 2026 school candidates lists who may register for the O-Level: Express and Integrated Programme students in Secondary 4, and Secondary 5 N(A) students. It also notes that a student offering Higher Mother Tongue takes the O-Level Mother Tongue paper in Secondary 3. No course in that list is in Secondary 1 or 2. SEAB has published the SEC syllabuses for 2027, but we have not seen its equivalent registration rules yet, and we will not guess at them.

What is a Sec 1 or Sec 2 oral, then?

It is your child's school's own assessment. In practice that means:

• The school decides the format. Reading aloud, a picture or video to talk about, a short presentation, a conversation, or some mix. Two schools can run it differently. We have not surveyed schools and will not describe a "typical" format.
• The school decides the marks and the dates. How much the oral counts in a term or year is a school decision, not a national one.
• It is not the O-Level or SEC oral. The national paper has a published format, published marks and published band descriptors. A school oral may borrow from it, or may not.

What should you ask your child's teacher?

The school knows exactly what it will set, so the fastest route to a real answer is the teacher. Four questions cover it:

1. Which parts are there: reading aloud, a picture or video stimulus, a conversation, a presentation?
2. How many marks is it, and how much does it count in the term or year?
3. Is it marked against a rubric, and can my child see it?
4. Does it follow the format of the national paper the school is preparing students for?

If the school gives out assessment information or a rubric for the oral, that is the only authoritative source for that school's oral. If you have not seen any, ask the teacher whether there is some.

What does the national oral look like?

This part is published, so it can be stated exactly. These are the oral papers in the 2027 SEC syllabuses, with their marks, SEAB's printed weighting and the length of the paper.

Chinese

The G3 Chinese oral has two parts. First 朗读短文 (reading a short passage aloud), worth 10 marks. Then 会话 (conversation), a conversation with the examiner about a video clip, worth 40 marks. Before the oral there is time to prepare, and the syllabus says the passage and the clip may be gone over more than once. There is also a separate listening paper. More: the O-Level / SEC Chinese oral, part by part.

English

In the G3 English oral, the video clip and prompt appear on a computer screen. Part 1 is a Planned Response (15 marks); Part 2 is a Spoken Interaction with the examiners (15 marks). There is no reading aloud at G3 or G2. G1 is the one level that keeps Reading Aloud (15 marks), alongside a Spoken Interaction worth 25 marks. More: the O-Level / SEC English oral and how the G1 and G2 English orals differ.

So if a Sec 1 or Sec 2 English oral asks your child to read a passage aloud, that is the school's choice. The G3 national paper has no Reading Aloud part.

Higher Chinese

Higher Chinese is shaped differently again: an 口头报告 (oral presentation) on a video clip, worth 20 marks, then a 讨论 (discussion) of that presentation, worth 20 marks. PSLE Higher Chinese has no oral paper at all, so a student who took Higher Chinese at PSLE meets a Higher Chinese oral for the first time at secondary level.

Which topics has the national oral asked about?

Because no Sec 1 or Sec 2 record exists, the nearest public evidence of what Singapore's examiners ask teenagers to talk about is the recalled record of the national oral: what candidates, parents and tuition centres wrote down afterwards. We publish it with the number of independent sources behind each item, and we never forecast a topic:

• Recalled Chinese 会话 themes, year by year
• Recalled English video-prompt themes, year by year

Read them as a record of what the national oral has asked secondary-school candidates about in past years, not as a Sec 2 syllabus and not as a forecast. We treat recall as a guide to the theme of a question and only approximate on its wording.

Will Sec 1 and 2 orals change when the SEC starts in 2027?

We cannot tell you, and nobody outside the school can. SEAB has published the 2027 SEC syllabuses and the shape of the 2027 examination year, and nothing in the documents we hold concerns lower-secondary school assessments. If the change matters to you, ask the school how its own orals will be set.