New AQA French draft spec – questions and responses put to the AQA Manager

Here’s a quick post based on a meeting with an AQA Manager. These sessions are available for sign up here and I would encourage you to attend one to have any questions addressed.

• Question: Will grammar taken into consideration for the dictation for box-fill activities for AQA?Draft papers – everything has to be written accurately – 100% including accents and spelling. Grammatically as well. Some words which are outside of the vocabulary list and there will be leniency. The students would therefore be penalised if they wrote portez/porté if the scaffold was: J’aime __________ des lunettes. This is therefore not only testing the construct of sound spelling correspondences (SSCs) but also that of grammar, and would arguably make the French dictation more difficult compared to Spanish owing to the multiple representations of certain phonemes and the need to digest grammar as well as the SSCs.

• Question: Will there be practice time for the spoken reading task? In Pearson, students are to be allowed to practice but not in the preparation room, so logistically hard. The practice for Pearson also has to be recorded according to AQA, which caused AQA to worry about examiners being influenced by an initial poor attempt, skewing the examiner’s minds and inducing bias. AQA will allow for students to restart if they need to. Final attempt will be marked.

• Question: Will there be stipulation on amount of times students can restart? Not at the moment; but teacher judgement should be used to know when to stop retrying. 

• Question: Will photo card question 1 always be ‘tell me about the photo’. 15 minute preparation time and as many notes as they want in that time. They can bring them in the test. We can keep afterwards and destroy. Following 3 questions supplied. AQA will give us suggested questions. Each photocard will have a theme; but we can ask about other subtopics as per now in the general conversation. Therefore banks of follow up questions could be created. Photo card marking moving away from communication-only that we associate with the task at the moment.

• Question: textbooks – OUP publishing a textbook for AQA along with updated Kerboodle. Working on the textbook and looking to have a starting pack early September. Higher book in October this year and Foundation book in February next year. Kerboodle early next year.

• Question: textbooks for KS3? AQA to produce some resources KS3 and embedding new skills for Year 8 and webinars for teachers. Face-to-face meetings as well. On demand unit for every topic and theme. Online, on-demand unit – dip in and out of it as we wish. Hour/hour-and-a-half to complete. Schemes of work – minimal changes and tweaking but with new skills along with vocabulary list.