A-level Spanish Study Group 2023-2024

This is where you can chat with other students studying the same subjects as you and support each other as you head towards your exams

You can post any useful tips and resources that you come across, offer support to others, share your successes, or just have moan when it gets tough!

Just remember, it’s against the site rules to ask for or offer any copyrighted papers, or to take conversations off-site to do these things. Posts that break these rules will be removed.

A few possible ice breaker questions are:
What exam board are you with?
What do you enjoy most about this subject/ course?
What area do you struggle with in this subject/ course?

Good luck with the next few months. Remember, ask for help, support where you can and together we can do this!

yes learning completely from scratch !! from what I gathered at the Leeds open day, the majority of those on the chinese course take it from scratch.

for the year abroad,I'd prefer to go to Taiwan rather than mainland china, I'd just feel a lot more at ease. Plus the cheapest flights to the philippines are £110 quid and 2 hours long and I'd love to go see my family more !!! and for french, since it's combined, the year abroad would be in mainland China or Taiwan and I'd spend one semester of a different year in France, preferrably Paris but it just depends where I'd be able to go !!

I was originally thinking of learning Japanese at uni but I think I could learn it online by myself, or through a society!!

yes i am doing aqa theres a textbook that i am using on kerboodle!! but take a look at this document full of year 12 topics! hope it helps <3 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UP77th99cQGZ-rKwTtiZyF4GADRqMNG2w7yeXSwj0TY/edit?usp=sharing

hey guys, i'm so glad to have found this forum haha my a-level language classes are tiny so there's pretty much no one to share the highs and lows with!
i'm doing a mock speaking exam tomorrow and i'm superrr nervous (i struggle with fear of all public speaking in general which doesn't exactly help but i love languages so i picked spanish and french anyway haha)
ok back to the point- does anyone have any last minute advice, especially for the stimulus card section? i know a lot of spanish and a fair amount of cultural facts but when i'm nervous i just keep having total mind blanks and/or getting everything wrong (
tysm guys xo

Hello there - lovely to read how supportive this group is to each other. I’m a parent - seeking all the ways I can encourage/support my young person as don’t get to find out too much! What is the textbook on kerboodle and what are the study texts I’ve seen mentioned?

Welcome! Lovely to have you here! Kerboodle has loads of different textbooks, both exam-board specific and in general (which is true for all subjects, if your child finds the Spanish stuff useful) - for example, I do Eduqas, but we use the AQA textbooks on Kerboodle because there isn't (as far as I know) an Eduqas textbook out there. It's a really useful resource because it also has listening questions and practice included as part of the textbook so you don't need to use a CD etc. like with older textbooks. Regarding the study texts, if you're doing A Level (not AS, because I think the requirements are different there) Spanish you have to study two pieces of Spanish media - one film and one 'text' (but that can be a book, a play, etc.), usually from a suggested list from the exam board. For example, I'm studying the film El laberinto del fauno and my text is the play La casa de Bernada Alba. The idea is that in the exam, you can be asked questions about specific themes/topics/characters/devices used in both pieces and write a mini essay (word count varies from exam board to exam board, but iirc it's usually somewhere between 200-400 words; mine is 300) response to a question in Spanish. I'd ask your child/ren what texts they're studying because there are tons of resources out there. Hodder Education have brilliant textbooks on a lot, if not all, of the usual chosen study texts, and they're not exam board specific. Hope this helps!

Hello! Parent here of A Level Spanish young person. Just wanted to encourage you with your Mandarin! I moved to China for a few years in my early thirties, had to learn Mandarin. I had a few lessons each week for an hour each then just being immersed in the language it is amazing how quickly you will pick it up. So go for it!

hiya how is everyone? has anyone started/or is starting their IRPs? 🙂 and if so, how are you planning it/doing research (you dont need to tell me your topic for legal reasons or smth like that)

hiya how is everyone? has anyone started/or is starting their IRPs? 🙂 and if so, how are you planning it/doing research (you dont need to tell me your topic for legal reasons or smth like that)

Hi, my teachers told us to start research over the summer and collate some notes so we have an idea of what we want to speak about but nothing formal yet. 2 weeks ago we were also asked to start drafting our 2 minute presentation so I summarised my research and timed it while speaking aloud to reach 2 minutes.

For research I googled my topic in both Spanish and English to get a range of sources then summarised the relevant parts in a word document with links to where I found the information.

Hope this helps!

does anyone else have reeeally heavy topics for translations??

we have weekly homework booklets that include translations and every week it's all about drug trafficking. human trafficking. the effects of drugs on the body. education. drugs. a school teacher who was also a drug addict/vendor. a guy who shoots himself in the head and gets a face transplant. natural disasters. terrorism. drugs.

Wow your Spanish classes sound very interesante — in my classes (AQA) we’ve just finished La inmigración, moving onto La integración and also Las dictaduras y monarquías
Maybe your exam board does more grim topics?? I’m not sure lol

they're not exam board specific, they're translations and reading exercises taken from past papers of all exam boards, and they're not topic specific either. we're with eduqas

also i think it's a bit odd that your syllabus splits up immigration and integration ? they're similar and go hand in hand so we're just combining them, it only took us a couple weeks to get through

Fair enough lol & it is nice to know vocab for more obscure scenarios like different types of trafficking (?) My point is more exposure is better than less

Yea for my exam board (AQA), immigration, racism and integration are listed as three separate sub-topics & we (as a class) couldn't figure out why either. Still can't believe that they get us to learn so many statistics that are only used in the speaking exam tho

i do aqa - hiya !

Heyy how are you doing? Love your weekly edits btw -- they remind me of what self-compassion coupled w motivation looks like!