How the AQA Spanish GCSE Works

AQA GCSE Spanish (8692) is a linear qualification: you learn across two years and sit every exam at the end, in one series. There is no coursework spread through the course and no modules to bank.

Your grade comes from four papers, one for each language skill, and each is worth 25% of the total:

Paper	Skill	Weighting
Paper 1	Listening	25%
Paper 2	Speaking	25%
Paper 3	Reading	25%
Paper 4	Writing	25%

Because the four skills are weighted equally, you cannot lean on one strength to carry you. A confident speaker who never practises dictation, or a strong reader who avoids writing, leaves a quarter of the marks exposed. The plan that works is steady coverage of all four.

This is the reformed specification, with first exams in June 2026. It replaces the older Spanish GCSE, so revision material written for the previous spec can point you at tasks that no longer exist. Everything in this lesson is built to the 8692 spec.

Spanish is a tiered subject. You are entered at one of two tiers, and you sit all four papers at that same tier.

Tier	Grades available	Who it suits
Foundation	1–5	Building secure control of core grammar and vocabulary
Higher	4–9	Aiming for the top grades; ready for more complex Spanish

The two tiers overlap at grades 4 and 5, so the choice is rarely dramatic. The key idea is that the content is stacked, not separate:

Higher tier = all Foundation content plus the Higher-only additions. Higher students must know everything a Foundation student knows, then extra structures on top.

Those Higher-only extras include grammar such as the present subjunctive and the passive voice, and roughly 500 more vocabulary items (about 1,200 words at Foundation, 1,700 at Higher). If you are entered for Foundation, you can safely skip lessons marked Higher without leaving a gap in your exam.

Paper 1 tests how well you understand spoken Spanish. The recording uses native speakers at a steady, clear pace, and the paper splits into two sections.

• Section A — comprehension: questions are set in English and you answer in English or non-verbally. You identify the overall message, key points, details and opinions from items such as announcements, conversations and short descriptions.
• Section B — dictation: you transcribe short spoken sentences into Spanish, with marks for accurate spelling. Each sentence is played three times (once whole, once in sections, once whole again).

Feature	Foundation	Higher
Total marks	40	50
Section B marks	8	10
Dictation length	minimum 20 words	minimum 30 words
Timing	about 35 minutes	about 45 minutes

The dictation is why pronunciation and spelling matter so much on the new spec: if you cannot map Spanish sounds to their letters, you cannot write down what you hear.

Paper 2 is your Speaking test. It is a non-exam assessment (NEA): your teacher conducts and records it during a window in April or May, and an AQA examiner marks it. It is worth 50 marks and has three parts.

Part	Marks	What you do
Role-play	10	Act out a short situation from a stimulus card, including asking a question
Reading aloud	15	Read a short Spanish text aloud, then a short unprepared conversation on it
Photo card	25	Describe two photos, then discuss the theme in an unprepared conversation

You get 15 minutes of supervised preparation beforehand. The whole test lasts about 7–9 minutes at Foundation and 10–12 minutes at Higher. The reading-aloud text is a minimum of 35 words at Foundation and 50 words at Higher, and it is chosen to test the sound-symbol correspondences so you must pronounce Spanish clearly enough for a native speaker to follow.

The final two papers cover the written language, and each now includes a translation section.

Paper 3 — Reading (50 marks; 45 min Foundation, 1 hour Higher):

• Section A — comprehension: questions in English on texts such as notices, adverts, articles, emails and websites.
• Section B — translation: translate sentences from Spanish into English (minimum 35 words Foundation, 50 words Higher).

Paper 4 — Writing (50 marks; 1 h 10 Foundation, 1 h 15 Higher): a set of structured tasks plus a translation from English into Spanish. The tasks scale up in length by tier, for example:

Task type	Foundation	Higher
Translation (English → Spanish)	minimum 35 words	minimum 50 words
Longest structured/open task	about 90 words	about 150 words

Access to dictionaries is not permitted in any paper, so vocabulary and spelling have to be secure from memory.

Every paper draws its content from the same three themes. There is no separate list of topics per skill: a theme can appear in Listening, Speaking, Reading or Writing.

Theme	Topics
1. People and lifestyle	Identity and relationships · Healthy living and lifestyle · Education and work
2. Popular culture	Free-time activities · Customs, festivals and celebrations · Celebrity culture
3. Communication and the world around us	Travel and tourism · Media and technology · The environment and where people live

Because the themes are shared across skills, vocabulary you learn for one paper pays off in the others. A word bank built around el medio ambiente (the environment) or la salud (health) helps you in the Reading text, the Writing task and the Speaking photo card alike.

Revising Spanish is not the same as revising a content subject. There is no fixed set of facts to memorise and recite; you are building a skill. Three strands run through all of it:

• Grammar — the prescribed structures (verb tenses, agreement, pronouns). Grammar is the engine that lets you build sentences you have never seen, so it earns the most revision time.
• Vocabulary — the prescribed word list for your tier. Little and often beats cramming; test yourself in both directions (Spanish → English and English → Spanish) because Writing and translation need recall, not just recognition.
• Skills practice — listening to real Spanish, reading aloud, writing short texts and speaking. This includes the sound-symbol correspondences and stress and accent rules, which feed directly into dictation, reading aloud and spelling.

1. Treating vocabulary and grammar as separate silos

They work together. Learn a new tense by using it with words you already know, and learn new words inside full sentences, not as isolated pairs.

2. Practising recognition but never recall

Reading Spanish and understanding it is easier than producing it. Dictation, translation into Spanish and the Writing paper all demand recall, so revise actively, not just by re-reading.

3. Ignoring pronunciation because "it's not written down"

On the new spec pronunciation is assessed directly in reading aloud, and it underpins dictation. The sound-symbol and stress rules are core revision, not an optional extra.