Students often understood the general gist of a passage but didn't give enough detail to communicate the entire message.

- Get students to ask themselves "what exactly is this question asking me? Train them to include the whole idea in their answers, rather than just a word they recognise.

Are higher numbers secure? Build this into regular retrieval practice. Easy marks if students know them!

Listening practice needs to support learners to avoid jumping to conclusions and to think carefully about plausible distractors.

Asking questions remains a significant weakness. Do you learners know the questions words? Can they understand them across different topics? Do they know how to form questions? Can they make lists of questions from an image?

Ensure students know what the question is asking them.

1. What are you going to do / did you do / do you do? - Answer must include an activity.

2. What do you think of - answer must include an opinion.

3. What do you like about... - answer must include a positive feature.

4. What would you like to .... - answer must be in the conditional tense

Don't waste time on the picture task giving opinions. They don't attract any credit.

Continue to make explicit phonics teaching a regular part of KS4 lessons - particularly focusing on the harder phoneme / graphemes.

Higher - make sure you provide multiple opportunities to use different tenses throughout the conversation to give students the opportunity to show what they know.

Encourage higher candidate to slow down during the read aloud. A steady measured pace makes it much easier for the examiner to assess the sound-symbol correspondance.

The strongest conversations at higher occurred where teachers responded naturally to what students said. Encourage your most able learners to learn language they can combine to answer lots of different questions. Make time for this in lessons!

For Foundation students - Simple and accurate beats ambitious and inaccurate! Write what you know how to say, not what you want to say.

Ensure all students are secure with a number of high frequency verbs across all persons and time frames.

Make sure students can accurately link a time indicator with the correct tense. The time indicator alone, doesn't demonstrate a past or future time frame if the verb that follows is wrong! Practice matching time indicators and tenses or get students to spot the error where the time indicator and the verb don't match.

Cover every bullet point. Answer the bullet points in order and use a new paragraph for each one. Model how to do this in your lessons.

At Higher, the basics need to be secure but there also needs to be enough variety, complexity and flexibility to move into the top bands. A useful way to think about this might be 1. Accuracy. 2. Variety. 3. Complexity.

At Higher variety can come through using different time frames alongside one another. For example in Sp using the preterite, the imperfect and possible the perfect together.

Encourage students to plan the topic specific language they are going to use. This will ensure there is variety in the verbs and structures they are using. Tick them off as they are used and avoid using them again if possible!

Never leave a translation gap. Don't know how to say it. Say something similar.

Higher Writing. Some candidates lost marks because they didn't answer the precise bullet point. For example - talking about a past activity rather than what they did after school for example. Candidates need to highlight command words and the different elements in the question, rather than writing something that vaguely fits.

The strongest written answers added relevant information to develop each bullet point, rather than adding additional information which was linked.

This can be done by:

1. Offering a contrasting opinion

2. Giving other people's opinions

3. Adding reasons

4. Sharing examples

Teachers might want to use the framework

1. Point

2. Opinion + Reason

3. Contrasting opinion + Reason

4. An example or another view.