AQA A-Level Hebrew (Modern) Past Papers & Mark Schemes

AQA A-Level Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) (specification code 7669) is taken predominantly by heritage speakers from Jewish communities — students who have spoken Hebrew at home, attended Jewish day schools or supplementary Hebrew classes, or spent extended time in Israel — and by students with strong connections to Israeli culture. The qualification develops advanced literacy in Modern Hebrew alongside cultural knowledge of Israel and Hebrew-speaking communities worldwide. Its three-paper structure assesses reading, writing, and listening, but its defining grammatical challenge — the Semitic root-and-pattern morphological system — shapes the entire language in ways that have no parallel in European languages. Paper 1: Reading and Writing tests reading comprehension of authentic Modern Hebrew texts — newspaper articles, cultural commentary, literary extracts, and formal documents — alongside translation tasks and shorter written responses in Hebrew. Modern Hebrew orthography presents a specific reading challenge: standard written Hebrew can be written with or without vowel diacritical marks (nikud). Most authentic adult Hebrew text — newspapers, books, and online content — is written without nikud, requiring readers to resolve vowels from context, grammatical knowledge, and word recognition. The reading comprehension materials reflect this authentic unvocalised convention. Paper 2: Writing requires an extended written response in Modern Hebrew — approximately 200 words — on a topic or prompt. This paper tests formal written Hebrew production: grammatical accuracy, range of vocabulary and grammatical structures (including binyan forms beyond the basic Pa'al pattern), coherent organisation, and appropriateness of formal register. Hebrew's right-to-left writing direction and the absence of nikud in formal writing are features candidates must manage fluently. Paper 3: Listening, Reading and Writing combines listening comprehension of Modern Hebrew audio material — taken from Israeli broadcast media — with additional reading and integrated writing tasks. The tracked version includes timing cues. Israeli broadcast Hebrew uses a relatively standardised pronunciation (close to the Sephardic/Mizrahi model adopted as the Israeli standard) that may differ from the Ashkenazi-influenced pronunciation some UK Jewish community speakers use. Modern Hebrew's revival from a primarily literary and liturgical language to a fully functioning vernacular — achieved largely through the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the early Zionist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is one of the most remarkable episodes in modern linguistic history, giving the language a distinctive relationship between its ancient roots and contemporary usage.