GCSE French, Spanish and German, marked against the real criteria

Vocabulary by theme, the grammar the papers actually test, and written tasks marked the way a board marks them — content, range of language and accuracy counted on separate grids, because that is how the grids are built. Three languages, three boards. The speaking exam is conducted by your teacher in school and is not something we assess; what is here is the written half.

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What "marked against the criteria" actually means

A piece of writing in a modern language is not marked out of one total. It is marked on separate grids that reward different things: one for saying what the task asked for, one for the range of language you reached for, one for whether it was correct. An answer can be correct from the first word to the last and still lose most of one grid.

A task in the style of an AQA 90-word writing question. The French below is original: the boards' own papers and word lists are their copyright.

Translation splits the same way: one mark for the meaning, one for the feature the sentence was chosen to test. Me gustan los idiomas is the Spanish for "I like languages", plural because the verb agrees with the thing liked, not the person liking it. Write the singular and the meaning still arrives — but the sentence was there to see whether you knew, and that mark goes.

The four skills, and the two that happen out loud

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are worth twenty-five per cent each, on all three boards, so half the qualification is spoken and heard. Plainly: the speaking exam is conducted and recorded in your school, by your own teacher, and we do not assess speaking. We do not mark listening either: both need audio, and this app does not mark recordings.

What is left is not a leftover. The speaking exam is three prepared pieces of work — a role play, a photo card, a conversation — and what sinks pupils is almost never pronunciation. It is arriving with nothing to say, or with the verbs unbuilt. That part is written first, which is what can be done here: answer the role-play prompts in full sentences, get the question forms and the tenses right on paper, then say them to the person who is marking you.

Languages are tiered too, so it is worth knowing which papers you are entered for: Foundation cannot award above a grade 5 however well it is answered.

Range and accuracy pull in opposite directions

These two marks are almost opposites. Accuracy rewards staying inside what you can get right; range rewards reaching for what you might not. On the same answer, at the same time.

So "use more complex structures" gets read as an instruction to find longer words, when the grids are not interested in long words. They are interested in whether you left the present tense, joined two ideas instead of listing them, and gave an opinion with a reason. In French that is the perfect against the imperfect, what happened once against what used to happen; in Spanish the preterite against the imperfect, the same distinction with different endings. In German it is word order first: the verb is the second idea, so Am Wochenende spiele ich Fußball inverts subject and verb, and in the perfect the participle goes to the end — Ich habe Fußball gespielt. German loses accuracy marks on that shape more often than on vocabulary.

The practical version: pick two or three structures you get right every time — a past tense, a conditional, a reason — and put them in every answer. That is a habit, not a talent.

The exams are built from a defined word list

This is what makes languages unlike every other GCSE. Under the specifications first examined in 2026 the vocabulary is defined in advance: AQA and Pearson Edexcel each publish a list, chosen by how often the items occur in the language, of 1,200 lexical items at Foundation and a further 500 at Higher — 1,700 in all, plus up to fifty short phrases and place names on top, and the papers are built so that nearly everything you meet comes from it. The figures and the list are on your board's site, because it is their list.

Which means the vocabulary is finite — one of the few parts of any GCSE where you can finish the material, and where an hour converts into marks on all four skills at once.

The catch is that recognising a word is not the same as producing it, with the gender and the spelling attached. So French words are worth learning with the article rather than alone — un portable, une émission — and German with the article and the plural, das Buch, die Bücher. Spanish is kinder, being mostly regular, until el problema and la mano, which are not. That is why this subject opens on a vocabulary drill by theme rather than on a paper.

The papers

63 questions across 7 papers, each with its own criteria. Everything here is written in the boards' own format and judged against their published criteria; the papers themselves belong to the boards and are not reproduced here.

Try it on your own answer

Open a paper, write what you would have written in the exam, including the wrong bits, and read what comes back. It is free to start and does not ask for a card.

Open GCSE Languages

The other subjects

Twenty-three in one place, aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR.