A-Level Japanese in England is a Pearson Edexcel qualification, specification 9JA0, Issue 2, July 2024, first assessed in May/June 2020. Its full title is Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Japanese (listening, reading and writing), and that parenthesis is the single most important structural fact about the course: there is no speaking paper. Speaking appears in the aims — students should develop speaking skills as part of their course of study, although there will be no assessment of those skills — and every mark in the qualification is earned by listening, reading, translating and writing. This is a different qualification from the Edexcel languages that do carry a speaking test, and different again from the AQA modern-language A-Levels, so folklore attached to either is unreliable here. There are three externally examined papers. Paper 1, Translation into English, reading comprehension and writing (research question), runs two hours thirty minutes, carries 80 marks and is worth 40 per cent: Section A is an unseen translation from Japanese into English for 20 marks, Section B is reading for 20 marks over four questions, and Section C is the research question for 40 marks, in which the student reads an unseen Japanese text and responds in Japanese to a statement about their own researched subject in roughly 600 to 700 characters. Paper 2, Translation into Japanese and written response to works, runs two hours forty minutes, carries 110 marks and is worth 30 per cent: Section A is an unseen translation from English into Japanese for 20 marks, and Sections B and C carry two extended essays of 45 marks each, either two on literary texts or one on a literary text and one on a film — two films are not permitted. Paper 3, Listening, reading and writing, runs two hours fifteen minutes, carries 60 marks and is worth 30 per cent: Section A is listening comprehension for 30 marks with individual control of the recording, and Section B is a 30-mark question in which the student summarises one heard source and one read source and then evaluates the viewpoints in both. One rule cuts across all three papers and is easy to get wrong: responses to the Paper 1 Section A translation, to the Paper 1 Section B comprehension questions and to the Paper 3 Section A comprehension questions are written in ENGLISH; every other response must be in Japanese. The content is four themes, each broken into two sub-themes and a research subject, and each of those divided into aspects; the specification prints all of them in Japanese and sets them in the context of Japan only. Theme 1, 変わっていく若者の生活, covers 教育 and 若者の健康, with the research subject 家族関係や人間関係. Theme 2, 変わっていく文化, is unusually broad: it is artistic culture through 変わるポピュラー・カルチャー and intellectual culture through テクノロジーの影響, with the research subject 変わっていく行事. Theme 3, 変わっていく人生観, covers 変化する労働 and 長引く不景気, with the research subject 高齢化社会. Theme 4, 東日本大震災後の日本, covers 3月11日とその直後 and 復興への政策, with the research subject 福島原発事故後の省エネ生活. Themes 1 and 3 are the society themes, Theme 2 the artistic and intellectual culture theme, Theme 4 the political culture theme. The independent research is examined inside Paper 1 Section C: the student chooses exactly one research subject, covers all three of its aspects, and sits the examination with no dictionary and no research documentation. Alongside the themes sit a prescribed grammar list in Appendix 2 — the て, ない, た and volitional forms with their attached constructions, the potential, causative and passive including the suffering passive, transitive and intransitive pairs, relative clauses, the conditionals たら, なら, ば and と, nominalisation with こと and の, and much else — and a prescribed kanji list in Appendix 3, on top of which knowledge of the GCSE kanji is assumed. Any kanji used in a question paper that is not on that list will be glossed. Two works are declared from the board's list of three literary texts and three films. Assessment objectives are weighted 20 per cent AO1, 30 per cent AO2, 30 per cent AO3 and 20 per cent AO4, and in this qualification AO1 and AO3 are written-only: AO1 is understand and respond IN WRITING to spoken language, AO3 is manipulate the language accurately IN WRITTEN FORMS. Paper 3 carries the whole of the AO1 weighting. No dictionary is permitted in any paper, and the AO3 grids in Papers 1, 2 and 3 all say the same thing in the same words: students are rewarded for using a wide variety of kanji.

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