This exam tips covers Exam Tips & Common Errors within Possessives and demonstratives: mon, ma, ce, cette for GCSE French. Revise Possessives and demonstratives: mon, ma, ce, cette in Core Grammar Toolkit for GCSE French with 15 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 7 of 7 in this topic. Treat this as a marking guide for what examiners are looking for, not just a fact list.
💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors
- In AQA writing and speaking tasks, using possessive adjectives correctly throughout a paragraph (not just once) signals grammatical control and picks up AO3 marks.
- Watch out for leur (possessive adjective, invariable singular) vs leurs (plural) — English has no equivalent distinction.
- In reading tasks, a possessive pronoun (le sien, la leur) can be ambiguous about ownership — use context from the whole passage to determine who owns what.
- Higher students: demonstrative pronouns (celui-ci/celle-là etc.) appear frequently in longer reading texts and in the translation task — recognising them is crucial for AO4.
❌ Common error: Lucas aime sa sœur → intended to mean "Lucas loves HIS sister" but sa is correct here. The problem arises when students write son sœur (because Lucas is male).
✓ Correct: Lucas aime sa sœur. (because sœur is feminine, whatever the gender of the owner)
Why it costs marks: Choosing the wrong possessive adjective gender is a direct AO3 error. The rule is clear in the AQA specification: agreement is with the gender of the noun owned, not the person who owns it. This mistake is extremely common among English speakers because English has no equivalent rule (we choose his/her based on the owner's gender).
Practice questions for Possessives and demonstratives: mon, ma, ce, cette
In French, a possessive adjective (e.g. mon, ma, son, sa) agrees with…
Which form of 'my' is correct in: '_____ sœur est sympa' (my sister is nice)?