Five mistakes students make on the French GCSE

As you prepare for your French GCSE exams, you’ll no doubt have heard plenty about what to do to get top marks. But equally important is learning what you shouldn’t do. Time and again, students make costly mistakes that could easily be avoided, from failing to read the question properly to failing to learn key grammar points.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the key mistakes even the strongest candidates make on their exams.

The exams can feel long. The Higher Tier AQA writing exam, for instance, is an hour and fifteen minutes. But you’ll be surprised how quickly time runs out in the exam hall.

The most important thing is to make sure you answer all the questions in the allotted time, even if it means having to abandon one answer before you’ve written quite as much as you’d like to. For the speaking exam, you will not be timed in the same way, but if you provide an answer that is too long, the examiner may interrupt you. The examiner will generally expect answers of between one to two sentences for lower mark questions, and three to five sentences for questions with higher marks.

Time management is an important skill, and the best way to practise is by doing past papers while timing yourself. You can find past papers for the AQA French exams on the AQA website.

This can be difficult to square with Point 1, but it’s equally important. Providing more detail doesn’t necessarily mean writing a much longer answer. Students frequently write pages upon pages without actually answering the question, because the question is asking for something specific. For example, a writing exam question may ask something like:

Tu as participé à un échange scolaire en France.

Décris:

• le voyage
• les activités que vous avez faites
• ce que tu as appris
• ce que tu aimerais faire la prochaine fois

To achieve full marks, you'll need to address each of the points in the list. Notice it also asks you to write 150 words, so make sure you hit that target. That doesn't necessarily mean counting every single word; by estimating how many words you write per line, you can get a rough sense of the word count by counting how many lines you've written, and adjusting accordingly.

Students often get so caught up in their answers that they forget exactly what has been asked of them. This kind of question would likely be worth around 30 marks, so in providing your answer, you will also need demonstrate your ability to juggle the past, present and future tenses and employ a range of GCSE-level vocabulary.

In short: Make sure you answer each part of the question, in the appropriate amount of detail. As a general rule of thumb, the more points a question is worth, the more detail you will be expected to give.

The two most common verbs in French are often confused for each other. Sometimes this is in their normal forms, 'to be' and 'to have', but more commonly it is in happens when they are used as auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are verbs which we used in conjunction with another verb (in the past participle form) to denote a specific tense, which at GCSE level will always be passé composé. There are only two auxiliary verbs: être and avoir.

How do you know which one to use for which verb? Avoir is used for transitive verbs, that is, verbs which take an object. Être, on the other hand, is used for intransitive verbs, and reflexive verbs. For more details, check out our blog on être vs avoir.

The official vocabulary list for AQA GCSE French is around 2,000 words, a large number of which are nouns. French is a gendered language, meaning every noun is either masculine or feminine, singular or plural. This is important to bear in mind when it comes to using articles, as these will be different depending on whether they noun they precede is masculine or feminine.

For masculine nouns: un, le

For feminine nouns: une, la

For nouns in plural : des, les

At GCSE level, you will be expected to know the gender of nouns, so it's particularly important to have memorised this before your writing exam. That's why when it comes to learning vocabulary, we always recommend learning the article alongside the noun.

Of course, if you don’t know, it’s still better to take a guess than leave out the article altogether - it’s a fifty/fifty chance you’ll get it right after all.

Here are some common nouns for which students often pick the wrong gender:

• le travail (work)
• le problème (problem)
• le système (system)
• le téléphone (phone)
• le film (film)
• le sport (sport)
• le pays (country)
• le monde (world)
• le moment (moment)
• le voyage (trip)
• le collège / lycée (school)
• le travail (job/work)

• la voiture (car)
• la famille (family)
• la vie (life)
• la musique (music)
• la télévision (television)
• la photo (photo)
• la chose (thing)
• la personne (person)
• la question (question)
• la réponse (answer)
• la langue (language)
• la ville (city)
• la plage (beach)
• la région (region)

False friends are French words which look like English words, but actually have totally different translations. Examples include:

le magasin - shop (not 'magazine')

actuellement - currently (not 'actually')

éventuellement - possibly (not 'eventually')

assister (à) - to attend (not to 'assist')

demander - to ask (not 'to demand')

la librairie - bookshop (not 'library')

le journal - newspaper (not 'journal')

la recette - recipe (not 'receipt')