French units & topics
All 52 topics in the AQA GCSE French specification (8652). Tap a unit to see its topics — every linked topic has free notes, quizzes and flashcards.
GCSE French under the new AQA specification (8652, first exams 2026) is genuinely demanding — not because French is impossibly difficult, but because it tests four completely different skills in the same subject. Your child must be able to listen to native-speed French and pick out detail under time pressure, read unfamiliar texts and infer meaning from context, produce accurate written French across three tenses in a timed exam, and speak spontaneously about topics they have never seen before. A student who is excellent at grammar exercises but weak on vocabulary will struggle badly. A student who can chat fluently but cannot write accurately will lose marks on the written papers. All four skills have to be built, and they have to be built together.
The defining feature of the new 2026 spec is a closed vocabulary list — around 1,700 headwords at Higher tier, around 1,200 at Foundation. Every listening and reading paper is written so that unknown words appear no more than roughly 4% of the time, and those words are glossed. In practice, this means that students who have systematically learned the defined vocabulary list will be able to engage with the papers; students who have not will find them opaque regardless of their grammatical knowledge. The four content themes — People and lifestyle, Popular culture, Communication and the world around us, and Study and employment — map onto all five papers. Vocabulary from all four themes appears in all four skills.
How to revise French — a complete, step-by-step plan
AQA French exam coming up? A plan for the final few days, paper by paper.
All 52 topics in the AQA GCSE French specification (8652). Tap a unit to see its topics — every linked topic has free notes, quizzes and flashcards.
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