Teacher Guide - Reading Comprehension (Q8 and Q9)

Edexcel A Level Spanish (9SP0) — Paper 1, Section B: Reading

Teacher Guide: Reading Comprehension Questions 8 and 9

What examiners reward, where students lose marks, and what has changed from 2018 to 2025

This guide is based on the question papers, mark schemes and Principal Examiner reports for all eight series from June 2018 to June 2025. All of them are saved in Spanish/A Level/Past Papers. References such as (ER 2024) mean the examiner report for that year and (MS 2023) the mark scheme. The teaching suggestions in Section 4 are ours. They follow from the evidence but do not come from Pearson.

1. The task

• Paper 1 lasts 2 hours and is worth 80 marks. Section B (Reading) is worth 30 marks, and Pearson recommends about 50 minutes for it. Questions 8 and 9 are the last two questions in Section B and together are worth 16 of the 30 marks.

• Each question is a long text of roughly 250–350 words followed by open questions. Students answer in Spanish, and each question is worth 8 marks.

• Every series so far has had one literary extract (novel, play or autobiography) and one non-literary text (usually a press article). Which one comes first changes from year to year.

• The Section B instructions state: “Open-response questions do not have to be written in full sentences and you may respond using single words or short phrases. You may use words from the text, but you must not copy whole sections.”

• Texts are drawn from the 12 sub-themes of the specification. The examiners describe them as including “historical texts (over 10 years old) and literary texts … 1st person and 3rd person accounts … texts of both fact and fiction” (ER 2018).

2. What examiners are looking for

The rules below appear in every mark scheme or come up again and again in the examiner reports. Each one is shown with real examples.

2.1 Understanding matters, not language quality

• “There are no marks for quality of language in this paper so errors and omissions in spelling and grammar will be tolerated as long as the message is not ambiguous” (MS 2025). Examiners “accepted many ungrammatical and poorly spelled versions of the verb morir” (ER 2022).

• But a spelling that changes the meaning scores nothing. Creer was rejected where crear (empleo) was needed (MS 2023, 8b). Fielidad / fieldad / lealidad caused problems in 2025, and lealtad de was often written instead of lealtad a (ER 2025).

• Answers in English score zero. Numbers must be exact: 2666 was not accepted for 26 666 (ER 2025).

2.2 Answer the question that was asked

This is the most common criticism in the reports. The question word decides what kind of answer is needed:

Sources: ER 2018, ER 2020, ER 2021, ER 2024, ER 2025; MS 2024, MS 2025.

2.3 Change the text’s words; don’t copy chunks

• Students may use words from the text, but a copied chunk (“lift”) only scores if it answers the question as it stands. “Students who rely upon copying chunks from the text usually do so because they have not understood either the text or the question. Lifts may well score, but only if they are a targeted answer to the question” (ER 2018).

• Common ways to change the text’s wording that examiners rewarded:

• From the 2022 report on: “Effective answers are often made up of words from the text used alongside the candidate’s own words.” Examiners warn that “too much or too little of the text could lead to a phrase that does not communicate accurately” (ER 2023, 2024, 2025).

2.4 Make it clear who is doing what

Spanish lets writers drop the subject. Examiners read a verb without a subject as referring to the person named in the question, and that is often the wrong person.

• 2019, 8f: the question named Nerea, so “no quiere…” was read as Nerea when students meant her husband (ER 2019).

• 2025, 9b: saltaba por encima de las reglas with no subject was read as the comisario, but it was the doctor (ER 2025).

• 2022, 9d: answers did not make clear whether José or Franco would be shot (ER 2022). 2024, 8b: many students mixed up who was shouting, the mother or the narrator (ER 2024).

• 2022, 9a: students had to work out that éste referred to the mayor, not José (ER 2022).

2.5 Two marks means two different ideas, and order matters

• Say the same thing twice and you only score once. ayuda mutua and solidaridad (2018, 9a); trabajar mucho / trabajos extra / acostarse tarde as three versions of one idea (2018, 9c); Quería unidad absoluta y una sola personalidad (2025, 8b).

• Order of elements: “Consider only as many elements as there are marks … the candidate’s first response is taken for assessment, even if this response is incorrect but the correct information follows” (MS 2025). A correct third idea does not rescue a wrong second one (ER 2022).

• Some 2-mark answers need two linked parts for one mark, e.g. theory and practice, general tourism and the local area (2023, 8d). The 2023 report notes: “occasionally, in a high demand question, there may be two ideas needed, e.g. a contrast or two elements of something.”

2.6 Working things out from the text

The lowest-scoring questions are nearly always the ones where students have to work out something the text doesn’t state outright. “At A Level, candidates are often asked to take an extra step beyond simply recognising words in a text” (ER 2024).

• Working out a meaning: living in the city would be better for Don José’s health, because he said country air was bad for him (2021, 8b).

• What a number stands for: 5 000 is the minimum death toll (2019, 9f); 80 000 is the lowest estimate of migrants without papers (2020, 8b); with al menos 30, “less than 30” is what does not qualify (ER 2025).

• Irony / contrast: link two separate places in the text (2019, 8f happiness; 2023, 9e what the father thought vs. what he did; 2024, 8b how the mother and narrator coped with suffering).

• Evidence for something: ¿Cómo sabemos…? ¿Qué evidencia hay…? ¿Cómo se deduce…? (2018 9e; 2019 9c; 2020 9d; 2022 8c; 2022 9e; 2023 8d; 2024 8a, 8d).

• Answer from the text, not from what you already know: in 2025, 8a many wrote that Catalan is part of the region’s identity, “which is not what the text actually said” (ER 2025).

2.7 Vocabulary gaps

• Everyday words let students down: ventana was not recognised (ER 2019). In 2025 some students wrote about ruedas without knowing what the word meant.

• Key literary vocabulary: duelos (deaths/mourning) decided 2024, 8c; visillo (net curtain) 2019. The examiners advise students to “Revise GCSE vocabulary in addition to what you have learned over the last 2 years” (ER 2022).

• Trabajos vs trabajadores (ER 2018), música vs músicos (ER 2020), and false friends (ER 2023, 2024).

3. Patterns from 2018 to 2025

3.1 Texts used

• Always one literary and one non-literary text. The literary text came first in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2024 and second in the other four years, so students should not expect a set order.

• Latin American literature appears regularly: Rulfo (2020), Darío (2022), García Márquez (2025). Cela has been used twice (2021, 2024).

• Civil War / Franco is the subject of the article in 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025, which is three of the last four series. The literary texts often have a Civil War or post-war setting too (La colmena).

• Immigration comes up in 2018, 2020 and 2023 (the literary text). Work and employment in 2018 and 2021.

• Articles are often not recent (a 2001 article in 2020, a 2007 one in 2023), in line with the “historical texts over 10 years old” in the specification.

3.2 How the 8 marks are split

• Recent papers have fewer, bigger questions. Between 2018 and 2022 there were usually 11–13 items, mostly worth 1 mark. In 2023 and 2025, Question 8 was four 2-mark questions, and there were only 9 items in total.

• “Da dos ideas” is now the standard wording, so the rules in 2.5 about two different ideas and order matter more than before.

• Questions follow the order of the text, so students can use them to find their way through it.

How many questions ask for more than one idea (Da dos ideas / Da dos detalles / Da dos ejemplos / Da tres ideas / Cita las dos…), counting each lettered question once:

Counted from the question papers. (i)/(ii) parts count as one lettered question.

3.3 Question wordings that keep coming back

Counts are out of the 86 lettered questions from 2018 to 2025. Each question is counted under one heading only.

Counted by hand from the question papers. Questions not in these groups mainly ask for straightforward facts or reasons (¿Qué…? ¿Por qué…? ¿Cómo…?).

3.4 How students performed

• Average scores were reported in 2018 and 2019 only: 2018 Q8 6/8, Q9 4/8 (the literary text, “the longest of the texts”); 2019 Q8 5/8, Q9 5/8.

• In later years the examiners describe results rather than giving averages. The items flagged as hardest are almost always the ones that ask students to work something out: 2021 8b, 2023 8d (“very few candidates scored both marks”), 2023 9d, 2024 9d–e, 2025 8c (“by far the most difficult”), 2025 9c and 9e (“only answered correctly by the strongest candidates”).

• 2025 Question 8 (Catalan under Franco) was “one of the most challenging questions on the paper.”

4. How to support students

These are suggestions, each aimed at one of the ways students lose marks in Sections 2 and 3.

4.1 An exam routine for every question

1. Circle the question word and decide what type of answer it needs: a person, an action (verb), a reason, a thing that is missing, a feeling. The examiners recommend this too (ER 2022).

2. Find the relevant lines. The questions follow the order of the text.

3. Change the wording to fit the question. Change the person (nuestra → su), turn a noun into a verb (una ley → se aprobó una ley), turn an effect into its cause (hambre → les faltaba comida).

4. Name who is doing what. Put a subject on every verb whose subject isn’t obvious.

5. Check the two ideas are different and put the one you are surest of first.

6. Cold-reader check: would someone who has not read the text understand the answer, and does it answer this exact question?

4.2 Classroom activities

• Lift-or-change sorting: give students text sentences, questions and possible answers taken from Section 2.3. They decide which ones score, then rewrite the ones that don’t.

• Question-word drills: give the same text with different question words (¿Quién? ¿Qué? ¿Qué pasó? ¿Qué le faltaba? ¿Por qué se menciona…?) and students answer each one with the right kind of answer.

• Swap and mark: students swap answers with a partner who hasn’t seen the text. If the partner can’t tell who did what, the answer needs a subject.

• Two-ideas highlighting: for every Da dos ideas question, students highlight two separate places in the text before writing. If both answers come from the same sentence, check they aren’t the same idea said twice.

• “So what?” practice: after each paragraph, ask what it tells us that it doesn’t say directly. Practise especially with numbers, irony and contrasts.

• Mark with the real mark schemes: the Accept/Reject columns show students exactly where the line is. Give them a question with its mark scheme hidden, then let them mark their own answers.

4.3 Reading diet

• Regular short extracts from Spanish and Latin American fiction, including 20th-century authors like those already used (Cela, Rulfo, Buero Vallejo, García Márquez). Include passages with plenty of dialogue so students practise following who is speaking.

• Articles on the Civil War, the Franco years and the Transition, immigration, and work and society, including older articles.

• Keep a vocabulary list of literary and historical words (visillo, partera, duelos, jornaleros, fusilado, bando, alzamiento, tribunal), pronouns that point back (éste, aquél, lo, le) and GCSE words that students still miss.

4.4 Timing

• Pearson recommends 50 minutes for all of Section B (Q5–Q9). Questions 8 and 9 carry more than half the section’s marks and have the longest texts, so students should leave at least 25–30 minutes for them. This is our suggestion based on how the marks are split, not Pearson guidance.

5. Materials in this folder