AQA A-Level Polish Past Papers & Mark Schemes

AQA A-Level Polish (specification code 7687) presents a particular grammatical challenge among the heritage language A-Levels: Polish has one of the most complex case systems of any European language, with seven distinct grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative) each requiring different inflectional endings on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals — and different endings depending on grammatical gender (masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter). This inflectional richness means that formal written Polish, where case agreement must be consistently correct, is a demanding achievement even for heritage speakers with strong spoken competency. Paper 1: Reading and Writing assesses reading comprehension of authentic Polish texts across different registers — journalistic, literary, and formal documentary — and includes translation tasks alongside shorter written production tasks. Polish reading comprehension requires comfort with the inflected sentence structure, where the grammatical role of each noun is marked by its ending rather than its position in the sentence, producing more flexible word order than English but also more potential for ambiguity when endings are confused or unfamiliar. Paper 2: Writing requires an extended written response in Polish — typically 200–250 words — in formal register. This paper tests the full range of Polish grammatical accuracy alongside vocabulary range, structural coherence, and the ability to develop an argument or narrative in sustained prose. The perfective/imperfective aspect distinction — a grammatical category absent in English that distinguishes between completed actions and ongoing or habitual ones — is one of the features that most characterises formal Polish writing. Paper 3: Listening, Reading and Writing combines listening comprehension of Polish broadcast media and formal spoken contexts with additional reading and writing tasks. The tracked version provides time cues within the recording. The listening section reflects the standard Polish used in public discourse — news broadcasts, formal interviews, documentary narration — which has specific pronunciation and intonation patterns. Poland's literary culture includes authors of international significance — Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Stanisław Lem — and a history of politically engaged literature stretching through the Romantic period to the Solidarity era, giving cultural depth to reading materials and listening content that draw on contemporary Polish public life.