Adjective Agreement — L'accord des adjectifs
🎨 Adjective Agreement — L'accord des adjectifs
Most adjectives follow a predictable pattern. The masculine singular form is the base; other forms are built from it.
Earn the mark scheme marks
💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors
- In AQA writing, every adjective you use is an AO2 opportunity — agreeing it correctly shows grammatical control. Disagreeing it loses an accuracy mark.
- When describing a person, always identify their gender first, then check your adjective endings — it is easy to write elle est grand by forgetting to apply the feminine form.
- Irregular forms like belle, nouvelle, vieille appear very frequently in AQA topics (home, environment, relationships) — learn them as vocabulary pairs, not as exceptions to look up.
- For Higher: using adjective position deliberately (pre-noun vs post-noun for meaning shift) is a sophisticated feature that can contribute to AO3 communication marks.
- If an adjective ends in -if in the masculine, the feminine always ends in -ive: sportif/sportive, actif/active, créatif/créative.
❌ Common error: Elle est très grand et sportif.
✓ Correct: Elle est très grande et sportive.
Why it costs marks: The subject is feminine (elle), so both adjectives must take the feminine form. Using the masculine base form is an AO2 grammar error — it shows the rule for adjective agreement has not been applied, which examiners note explicitly in the mark scheme.
❌ Common error: J'ai une maison belle et nouvelle.
✓ Correct: J'ai une belle et nouvelle maison.
Why it costs marks: beau/belle and nouveau/nouvelle are BAGS adjectives — they must go BEFORE the noun. Placing them after is a positional error that costs an AO2 mark and sounds unnatural to a native speaker.