AQA A-Level Spanish Past Papers & Mark Schemes

AQA A-Level Spanish (specification code 7692) is distinguished from other modern language A-Levels by the geographic scale of its cultural frame of reference. Where French and German A-Levels draw primarily on one or two countries' culture and history, Spanish encompasses an entire hemisphere — Spain's 20th-century political history, the independence movements of Latin America, the literature of Borges and García Márquez, and contemporary immigration debates across the Spanish-speaking world all feature across the three papers. Paper 1: Listening, Reading and Writing (2 hours 30 minutes, 100 marks, 50%) assesses listening comprehension (recordings drawn from Spanish broadcast media across Spain and Latin America), reading comprehension (texts from journalistic, literary, and documentary sources), and translation in both directions — Spanish to English and English to Spanish. The thematic content intentionally spans the full breadth of the Spanish-speaking world: la familia y las relaciones, el medioambiente, la inmigración, la historia del siglo XX en España (the Civil War, the Franco era, the Transition to democracy), and cultural expression in literature, film, and music from both Spain and Latin America. The regional accent variation in listening recordings means students benefit from exposure to both Castilian and Latin American varieties of spoken Spanish. Paper 2: Writing (2 hours 40 minutes, 80 marks, 20%) requires a critical essay of around 300 words written entirely in Spanish on one of the studied set texts or films. Set literature options include works such as La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Lorca, Bodas de sangre, novels by Latin American authors including García Márquez, Allende, and Vargas Llosa; film options include works by Pedro Almodóvar and other directors from Spain and Latin America. Both literary and cinematic analysis must be conducted in Spanish, making the quality of written expression inseparable from the quality of argument. Paper 3: Speaking (21–23 minutes, 60 marks, 30%) follows the same format as AQA's other modern language A-Levels: a stimulus card discussion on a course theme (7–9 minutes), then presentation and discussion of the student's independent research project (11–13 minutes). The research project on a Spanish-speaking cultural topic of the student's choice can range from the Spanish Civil War to contemporary immigration policy in Mexico, from Gaudí's architecture to the literature of the Southern Cone.