A1 to A2: what actually changes
Two things arrive, and one of them is bigger than it looks
A band label tells you almost nothing about what you will be able to do differently next month. The objectives underneath it do, and for the first transition the change is unusually clean: between A1 and A2, two capabilities arrive, and the smaller-sounding one is the one that reorganizes your speech.
The first is time. Look at what an A1 grammar sequence contains: to be, articles and plurals, the present simple, possessives, there is and there are, question words, can, and going to. Almost all of it describes how things stand at the moment you are speaking. A1 is a band that lives in the present, and going to sits deliberately last in the sequence as the first crack in that.
A2 opens with the past simple — regular verbs and the high-frequency irregulars — and then adds the present continuous against the present simple, comparatives, quantity words, have to and should, and will against going to. The effect is that events acquire positions. You can put something before now, after now, or in progress right now, and say which.
The second arrival is the joint. The last item in the A2 grammar sequence is basic connectors: because, but, so, then, after that. That looks like a minor vocabulary addition and it is the structural change of the whole band.
Why the connector matters more than the tense
Read the A1 objectives as a list and they are all single moves. Greet someone and exchange names. Give your age and job. Ask the time. Order a coffee and ask the price. Ask where something is. Each is complete in one or two utterances, and each ends when the other person responds.
Now read the last A2 objective: tell a short personal story with basic connectors. A story is what a set of utterances becomes once they have joints. The A2 can-do goal says it plainly — routine tasks and short social exchanges handled “in short, connected sentences.” Connected is the operative word.
What that changes in a conversation is who is holding it up. At A1 you are answering: the other person supplies a question, you supply a unit, they supply the next question. At A2 you can continue on your own for a few sentences, and the conversation stops being a series of prompts. That is also why A2 feels harder than the objective list suggests. Nobody is handing you a new question every eight seconds any more, and the silence between your sentences is now yours to fill.
The exit rule is deliberately partial
There is a rule for when A1 is finished, and it is worth reading closely because the shape of it is not what people expect.
The criterion is that A1-obj-01 through A1-obj-07 are mastered and the rest are at least in active practice. Ten objectives in the band; seven of them have to be solid. You cross while three are unfinished, on purpose.
The three left open are describing your home and immediate surroundings, asking basic directions and locations, and making simple plans with going to. This is not an arbitrary cut at the seventh row. Every one of those three has a direct successor in the next band. Describing places continues as A2’s objective for describing people, places and things with adjectives. Directions continues as giving and following directions and travel instructions. Simple plans continues as talking about future plans and intentions.
So finishing them at A1 would mean doing the same work twice, once with a smaller grammar. The band boundary is drawn where it is because the trailing objectives are the ones the next band will exercise anyway.
The practical consequence is that “I am not ready yet because I still cannot do X” is often wrong. It depends entirely on which X. If the gap is introducing yourself or talking about your routine, you are not ready. If the gap is asking directions, the next band is where you were going to fix it regardless.
What the prose criterion actually demands
Alongside the objective states sits a written exit criterion, and it is short: sustain a simple five-minute conversation about yourself, your family and your routine, with frequent but non-blocking errors, producing present-simple statements and yes/no questions, and needing only occasional support in your own language.
Three things in that sentence are worth separating out.
Sustain is a duration, not a performance. It is not asking for good sentences for five minutes. It is asking that the conversation not collapse.
Yes/no questions is there because asking is a separate skill from answering and gets far less practice. Most beginner conversation is one-directional — the tutor asks, the learner answers — and a learner who has never had to invert a verb under time pressure will find they cannot, months after they could explain how.
Frequent but non-blocking sets the error tolerance for the band, and it is a tolerance rather than a target. What CEFR levels actually mean makes the general point about errors being written into the descriptors; the specific number here is that at A1 they are expected to be frequent.
What to do on Tuesday
Three moves that push directly against the A1 ceiling, all of which you can run inside an ordinary conversation.
Add a reason to every answer. Asked what you did at the weekend, do not stop at the event. Attach a because, a but, or a so. This is the connector objective and it is the only one you can practice on literally any question you are asked.
Talk about yesterday, not just today. The past simple is the first item in the A2 sequence and it is the structure a learner most reliably avoids, because the present simple is available and nobody objects. If your practice conversations are all about your routine, you can complete a great many of them without ever producing a past tense.
Ask something back. One question per exchange, of your own. It costs you nothing in accuracy — a wrong question still gets answered — and it is the half of the exit criterion nobody trains.
One more thing worth knowing about this stretch. Support in your first language is high at A1 by design, and it is supposed to decay across A2 rather than being switched off at the boundary; when your teacher should switch to your language covers how that setting should move.
The thing that does not change
One warning about the transition, because it is the most common way A2 goes wrong.
Gaining a past tense does not mean you now narrate. It means you can. The gap between a structure you have been introduced to and a structure that comes out unprompted while somebody is waiting is the whole difficulty of speaking, and it is not closed by a grammar lesson — it is closed by producing the structure repeatedly in conversations where it was the right choice and nobody told you so in advance. That gap is the subject of why speaking is the skill that does not transfer, and it is why the A2 objective list is written as things to do rather than things to know.
Treat A2 as a harder version of A1 and you will practice the same exchanges more carefully. What the band actually gives you is a past, a future, and a second half to your sentences — and with them, an end of the conversation you hold up yourself rather than one that happens to you.