GCSE French: The Complete Guide

GCSE French changed more in 2024 than it had in a decade. Students sitting it from June 2026 onwards are taking a qualification with a prescribed vocabulary list, two new tasks, and a much clearer definition of what counts as fair game in an exam.

This is an overview of the whole qualification: what the papers are, what is actually on them, and where to put your effort. Each skill has its own guide linked below.

Tiers and grades

GCSE French is tiered. Foundation covers grades 1 to 5; Higher covers grades 4 to 9. You must sit all four papers at the same tier. You cannot mix.

The decision matters more than students realise. Higher tier caps nothing but has more content, a longer dictation, a longer translation and a higher vocabulary requirement. Foundation is not a soft option so much as a different ceiling: a grade 5 achieved comfortably is worth more than a grade 4 scraped in distress.

This applies to AQA and Edexcel, the two boards offering GCSE French in England. In Wales, WJEC is untiered and graded A* to G; in Northern Ireland, CCEA is still running its 2017 specification. Eduqas withdrew from GCSE modern languages, with a final assessment opportunity in Summer 2025, so it is no longer an option. The differences are set out in the board comparison.

The four papers

All four are worth 25% each. No skill can be neglected without capping your grade.

Listening

A written exam of roughly 35 minutes at Foundation and 45 at Higher, including reading time. Two sections: comprehension answered in English, then a dictation, new to this specification.

The dictation is the task with the least established revision advice, and the one where technique pays fastest. Full detail in the listening guide.

Speaking

Non-exam assessment: 7 to 9 minutes at Foundation, 10 to 12 at Higher, plus 15 minutes of supervised preparation. Conducted and recorded by your own teacher, marked by an examiner who was not in the room. Three tasks: a role play, a reading-aloud passage with questions, and a photo card discussion.

On both English boards, more than half the speaking mark sits in an unprepared conversation. See the speaking guide.

Reading

A written exam: 45 minutes at Foundation, an hour at Higher. On AQA, 50 marks split into comprehension (40 marks, questions and answers in English) and translation from French into English (10 marks): a minimum of 35 words at Foundation, 50 at Higher. Edexcel's reading paper also ends with a translation into English.

This is also the only paper that assesses words derived from the vocabulary list rather than just the listed words themselves, a quirk worth exploiting, covered in the reading guide.

Writing

A written exam of around an hour and a quarter. Responses are in French. On AQA it includes a task of approximately 90 words chosen from two options, an open-ended task with two compulsory bullet points, and a translation from English into French worth 10 marks.

That translation is marked in a way worth understanding. The passage is divided into 15 elements, and a tick is awarded for each one communicated despite minor inaccuracies. Accuracy is then judged separately across all five sentences as a whole. So an imperfect attempt still scores on the first grid, and a blank scores nothing on either.

The writing guide covers each task, the word counts, and why the 90-word question is really a tense test in disguise.

The prescribed vocabulary list

This is the single biggest change, and the one parents most often have not heard about.

Exams are now built from a defined list. On both AQA and Edexcel, students are expected to know 1,200 lexical items at Foundation, and a further 500 at Higher (1,700 in total), plus 30 short phrases and 20 geographical or cultural items on top. The list is comprehensive and assumes no prior vocabulary from primary or Key Stage 3.

Three consequences follow, and they are good news:

  • Revision has a finite, knowable target. For the first time, "have I learned enough vocabulary?" has an answer.
  • Texts are built from the list. Up to 2% of any text may be cognates from outside it, plus a further 2% of glossed unknowns. You should not meet a wall of unfamiliar words.
  • Going beyond the list is not penalised. Both boards give equal credit to language beyond the defined content, and both confirm full marks are reachable using only the list. Ambition costs nothing and earns nothing.

The dictation is the deliberate exception: words from outside the list appear in it, because that task tests whether you can write French sounds rather than whether you recognise vocabulary.

How the lists are built, what counts as one item, and where to download them is in the vocabulary list guide.

The prescribed grammar list

Grammar is prescribed in the same way, in two tiers. Higher tier students must apply everything on the Foundation list plus the Higher additions. Both receptive and productive knowledge are required: you must understand it when you meet it and use it when you write and speak. The one exception is derivational morphology, which is assessed in the reading paper only.

This is why tense range matters so much in the mark schemes. The grammar you need is listed; demonstrating it is how accuracy marks are earned.

It is also worth knowing what the reformed specifications have removed. The subjunctive, the pluperfect and the passive in any tense but the present have gone from AQA and Edexcel entirely, so a good deal of older revision material is aimed at content that is no longer examined. The full breakdown, tier by tier and board by board, is in the grammar by tier guide.

Themes

AQA organises content into three themes covering identity and relationships, popular culture, and communication and the world around us. Edexcel uses six broader thematic contexts. The themes apply across all four papers.

Listening and reading texts are set in the context of French-speaking countries and communities. In speaking and writing, you answer from your own experience, so the themes are a map of what might come up, not a script to memorise.

What actually changed

If you are working from older resources, or from an older sibling's notes, these are the differences that matter:

  • The dictation is new. It did not exist before.
  • Reading aloud is new in the speaking test, and it replaced part of what used to be a general conversation.
  • Vocabulary is now prescribed rather than indicative.
  • Questions and answers in comprehension are in English, so those papers test understanding rather than production.
  • Translation runs both ways: into English in the reading paper, into French in the writing paper.
  • Several tenses have been dropped from the grammar requirements on the English boards.
  • Eduqas has left the subject, so any resource listing it as a current GCSE French board is out of date.

How to revise, by paper

Listening. Five minutes of self-dictation daily beats an hour of passive listening weekly. Play a sentence, write it, check it against a transcript, and keep an error list organised by sound rather than by word.

Speaking. Record yourself. The examiner hears a recording and nothing else, so you should hear what they will. Practise question formation and tense switching separately from full mock tests.

Reading. Work through the vocabulary list systematically (it is finite, which makes it the most efficient revision available) and practise word families, because this is the paper where derived words appear.

Writing. Plan around three time frames before writing anything. Count your words in practice until you know what 90 words feels like. For translation into French, attempt every element: partial credit is built into the mark scheme.

Across all four. Read French aloud for five minutes a day. It builds the sound-to-spelling map that the dictation tests and the reading-aloud task assesses, and it costs almost nothing.

A rough timeline

  • Year 10: content and vocabulary. Start working through the list early; leaving 1,200 items to Year 11 is how students end up cramming.
  • Autumn of Year 11: begin exam technique alongside content. If your board pre-releases anything, this is when to start on it.
  • Spring of Year 11: the speaking assessment window opens in April and runs up to five weeks. Speaking comes first; plan for it.
  • May and June: the three written papers.

The guides

  • GCSE French by board: what differs between AQA, Edexcel, WJEC and CCEA.
  • The vocabulary list: how the prescribed lists work, what the 2% rule allows, and where to download them.
  • Grammar by tier: exactly what Foundation and Higher require on each board, and what the reformed specifications dropped.
  • Speaking: task structure and mark splits, and what earns marks.
  • Listening: how to work the dictation, and what it is really testing.
  • Reading: comprehension technique, translation into English, and the derived-word rule unique to this paper.
  • Writing: the word counts, the bullet points, and the translation into French.
  • Edexcel International GCSE (4FR1): a different qualification, if that is the one you are sitting.

Practice materials

A free taster course is available, and the rest of the free resources are here.

Working on this with me

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For sustained work, I teach 55-minute one-to-one GCSE French lessons.

Last checked September 2026 against the awarding bodies' published specifications.