Anyone else do Russian A-level?

I know theres very few of you out there, only 2 other people at my school who do it and there are pretty much no threads on Russian on this forum lol .

A tebe zachem, yazikovoy praktiki chtoli ne hvataet?

I'm doing it at GCSE, gonna take it for A Level. What am I letting myself in for lol?

Ok, thanks for the info. What was your AS grade?

Bloody hell, are your parents Russian?

I'm doing it at GCSE, gonna take it for A Level. What am I letting myself in for lol?

nah i think languages just come naturally to me (and also the language teachers at my school are quite competent).

Same! I'm in Year 11 right now, and I'm going to take it all the way to A2, but I really don't know what I've got myself into!

Russian's a cool language to know though, and it is quite fun.

That's a very impressive grade, even more so considering you learnt Russian from scratch. I'm going to try to get an A at AS but at A2 it sounds much more difficult.

well i did gcse russian too so i had a good 2 years BG at least . Good thing is that the grade boundaries are quite low so that even though its hard you can still obtain a good mark, heres last years grade boundaries for both AS and A2:

************************max A B C D E N U
6RU01 Russian 1 50 37 32 27 23 19 15 0
6RU02 Russian 2 70 48 43 38 33 28 23 0

**************************max A* A B C D E N U
6RU03 Russian 3 50 43 38 33 28 24 20 16 0
6RU04 Russian 4 100 82 73 64 55 46 38 30 0

dammit it doesn't like spaces or alt 255 ¬¬ you get the picture anyway lol

Do you have a link for the mark scheme? I can't quite make it out lol.

well i did gcse russian too so i had a good 2 years BG at least . Good thing is that the grade boundaries are quite low so that even though its hard you can still obtain a good mark, heres last years grade boundaries for both AS and A2:

************************max A B C D E N U
6RU01 Russian 1 50 37 32 27 23 19 15 0
6RU02 Russian 2 70 48 43 38 33 28 23 0

**************************max A* A B C D E N U
6RU03 Russian 3 50 43 38 33 28 24 20 16 0
6RU04 Russian 4 100 82 73 64 55 46 38 30 0

dammit it doesn't like spaces or alt 255 ¬¬ you get the picture anyway lol

I guess the low grade boundaries are comforting. It's like that at GCSE as well.

What was the transition from GCSE to AS like, in terms of both the content covered, and the atmosphere in the classroom? I currently have 13 people in my GCSE class, and I believe there might be even more people in my class next year, due to the merging of two classes.

Would you say it's slightly less formal and more relaxed? My teacher suggested we'll be doing more discussions in groups and also as a class. I know the style of teaching will vary between teachers, but did you notice a big change?

How much time do you get for oral practice every week?

Are the examiners much stricter with spelling and grammar than they are at GCSE?

I'd be thrilled if you could answer some of my questions.

Thanks

I guess the low grade boundaries are comforting. It's like that at GCSE as well.

What was the transition from GCSE to AS like, in terms of both the content covered, and the atmosphere in the classroom? I currently have 13 people in my GCSE class, and I believe there might be even more people in my class next year, due to the merging of two classes.

Would you say it's slightly less formal and more relaxed? My teacher suggested we'll be doing more discussions in groups and also as a class. I know the style of teaching will vary between teachers, but did you notice a big change?

How much time do you get for oral practice every week?

Are the examiners much stricter with spelling and grammar than they are at GCSE?

I'd be thrilled if you could answer some of my questions.

Thanks

There's only 5 people in my French and 7 in Russian lol.

The atmosphere was a lot more relaxed but i think a large part was because few people decided to continue to learn Russian (13 at gcse, 4 at AS, 3 at A2) thus i guess there was a more friendly one to one tuition.

The transition between GCSE and AS wasn't too bad when considering the large gap between scientific subjects. As you'd expect theres just more grammar and more vocab and the topics are rather similar to gcse eg. obesity, alcohol, sport etc.

There wasn't much sort of 'dedicated' oral practise every week, our teacher generally tries to incorporate speaking when going over our topics during lessons to try and get us to become more fluent. We generally start preparing for the speaking exam around jan just getting sentences together and towards the time when we do it we may get 20 minutes practise sessions with the teacher.

The main thing is the vocab and how well you respond that gets you the marks. An essay out of 45 generally only has 5-7 marks dedicated to accuracy so you can be really sloppy and still get good grades.