GCSE French Listening: Practice, Technique and the New Dictation

Listening is the paper students feel least able to influence. You cannot ask the recording to slow down, you cannot look anything up, and when a word goes past you it is gone. That feeling of helplessness is why most revision skips it.

It is also the paper where the reformed specifications changed most, because AQA, Edexcel and Eduqas now all include a dictation — a task with no equivalent in the old GCSE, and almost no established revision advice around it.

How the paper is built

AQA (8652) — Paper 1, 25% of the qualification. Foundation is 40 marks in about 35 minutes; Higher is 50 marks in about 45 minutes. Both include five minutes’ reading time at the start and two minutes’ checking time at the end. Section A is comprehension, Section B is the dictation. Students may make notes at any time during the test, including the reading time.

Edexcel (1FR1) — Paper 2, 50 marks, with five minutes’ reading time before the first extract. Section A is comprehension, set in English and answered in English. Section B is the dictation, set in French.

Eduqas — Component 2, 50 marks, 35 minutes at Foundation and 45 at Higher. Listening comprehension carries 40 marks, answered in English; the dictation carries 10.

On every board the recordings are delivered in standard French at no faster than a moderate pace, with each word clearly articulated. AQA records in studio using native speakers. No dictionaries anywhere.

The dictation is the part to prepare for

It is new, it is worth real marks, and it is the one task where technique makes an immediate difference.

On AQA the dictation is a minimum of 20 words at Foundation and 30 at Higher. Two words in it come from outside the prescribed vocabulary list — deliberately. Eduqas does the same thing: two words from outside the list at Foundation, three at Higher.

That design tells you what is being tested. It is not only whether you recognise words you have learned. It is whether you can write down French sounds accurately when you have never seen the word before.

On AQA each sentence is heard three times: first as a complete sentence, then in short sections, then as a complete sentence again. That sequence is the task telling you how to work it:

• First hearing — do not write. Listen for the shape of the sentence and how many chunks it has. Students who start writing immediately lose the end of the sentence.
• Second hearing — write. This is the pass built for transcription, broken into manageable sections.
• Third hearing — check agreements and endings. Not content. By now you have the words; what you are listening for is whether it was elle a or elles ont.

How it is marked matters. On AQA the dictation carries two separate marks: communication of meaning (AO1) and transcription and grammatical accuracy (AO3) — four marks each at Foundation, five each at Higher. The two interact in one direction only. A zero for communication forces a zero for accuracy, but otherwise a weak communication mark does not cap your accuracy mark.

The practical consequence: write something for every sentence. A plausible attempt that conveys the meaning keeps both marks alive. A blank line scores nothing twice over.

What the dictation actually tests

It tests sound-spelling correspondence — the relationship between what French sounds like and how it is written. That is a different skill from vocabulary, and it fails in predictable places:

• Silent endings. Il parle and ils parlent sound identical. Only the rest of the sentence tells you which it is.
• Liaison hiding word boundaries. Les amis sounds like one word. Students write one word.
• Nasal vowels. The distinctions in vin, vent and vont carry no English instinct behind them.
• Homophones. Et and est, ou and où, a and à. These are grammar decisions, not listening ones.
• Accents. A missing acute on a past participle is an accuracy error even when the word is right.

Every one of these is practisable away from the exam, in short sessions, using any French audio at all.

Section A: comprehension

Questions are in English and answered in English on all three boards, so this section tests understanding rather than production. Students are asked to identify the overall message, key points, details and opinions across items such as announcements, short conversations, bulletins, podcasts and spoken descriptions. On every board the extracts increase in complexity as the paper progresses.

Three things separate strong performances:

Reading time is working time. Five minutes before the recording starts is enough to read every question and predict what kind of answer each needs — a number, a place, an opinion, a reason. Students who know what they are listening for hear it. Students reading the question for the first time while the audio plays do not.

Opinion questions are the discriminator. Identifying a fact is easier than identifying an attitude. Attitude is carried by tone, by negation, by mais — and the clue is often at the end of the sentence, after the part that sounded like the answer.

Detail questions punish early commitment. A speaker often states something and then corrects or qualifies it. Students who write the first plausible answer and stop listening lose these consistently.

What costs marks

• Leaving a dictation line blank. The single most expensive habit in the paper.
• Writing during the first hearing. You lose the sentence’s ending to gain its beginning.
• Answering in French where English is required in the comprehension section, or the reverse in the dictation.
• Stopping to fix a spelling mid-sentence while the recording continues.
• Not using the checking time. Two minutes at the end of the AQA paper is enough to catch several agreement errors.

How to practise

Listening is the skill most often revised by doing nothing in particular — playing French in the background and hoping. That builds familiarity but not marks. These do:

Dictate to yourself, daily, in five minutes. Take any French audio with a transcript, play one sentence, write it, then check against the transcript. The checking is where the learning happens: you are finding out which sounds you systematically mishear.

Keep an error list by sound, not by word. If you write manger for mangé, the problem is not that word — it is every -er and -é ending in the language. Fix the pattern.

Read aloud to improve your listening. The two skills share one underlying map between sound and spelling. Reading French aloud deliberately builds the same map the dictation tests, which is why it helps both papers at once — see the notes on the speaking test.

Practise at normal speed. Slowing audio down feels productive and trains the wrong thing. The exam is at moderate pace and will stay there.

Predict before you listen. Cover the audio, read the question, and say aloud what kind of answer it wants. Do this on every past paper and reading time becomes automatic.

Practice materials

A free taster course is available with listening practice and dictation exercises.

A note on the other boards

The dictation is a feature of the reformed English specifications. It does not appear everywhere. WJEC in Wales sets a 45-minute listening paper worth 20% of the qualification and 45 marks, with responses in Welsh or English — a higher weighting than any English board gives listening. CCEA is still running its 2017 specification, in which listening is one of four equally weighted units. And if you are sitting Edexcel International GCSE (4FR1), there is no dictation at all: seven tasks, each text heard twice, and spelling need only be comprehensible. See the full 4FR1 breakdown.

Working on this with me

Dictation is hard to self-mark, because the errors you cannot hear are precisely the ones you will not spot in your own transcription. If you would like to work on it, book a free 15-minute call — add it to your basket and check out, the total is £0, and you will receive an email with the link to book a time.

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