Pearson Edexcel A-Level Portuguese Past Papers & Mark Schemes

Pearson Edexcel A-Level Portuguese (specification 9PG0) covers the world's sixth most spoken language, spanning the lusophone world from Portugal and Brazil to Mozambique, Angola, and beyond. A distinctive feature of this A-Level is the need to navigate the significant differences between European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) — in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and register — as exam materials may draw from both varieties. Paper 1 (Listening, Reading and Translation — 2 hours, 80 marks, 40%) presents particular challenges for listening comprehension. European Portuguese is notoriously difficult to understand aurally — vowels are heavily reduced in unstressed positions (making spoken EP sound quite different from written Portuguese), and consonants cluster in ways unfamiliar to English speakers. Brazilian Portuguese, by contrast, tends to be more melodic and phonetically transparent. Students must handle both. Translation sections test Portuguese-specific grammar: the personal infinitive (a construction unique to Portuguese among Romance languages), the future subjunctive (largely obsolete in Spanish but alive in Portuguese), and the distinction between 'ser' and 'estar'. Paper 2 (Written Response to Works and Translation — 2 hours 40 minutes, 120 marks, 30%) engages with literature and film from across the lusophone world — from Saramago's Nobel-winning prose to Brazilian cinema exploring favela life, racial identity, and social mobility. Essays must be written entirely in Portuguese, requiring facility with the language's rich system of verb tenses including the pluperfect simple (which Portuguese uses in ways Spanish and French no longer do). Paper 3 (Speaking — approximately 30 minutes, 72 marks, 30%) covers themes including Portugal's colonial legacy, Brazil's social inequality and cultural diversity, and the relationship between lusophone African nations and their former coloniser. This archive of 42 resources provides targeted practice across both legacy and current specification papers.