A-Level Modern Greek in England is a Pearson Edexcel qualification, specification 9GK0, Issue 1, January 2018, first taught from September 2018 and first certificated in 2020. Its full title is Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Greek (listening, reading and writing), and that parenthesis is the single most important structural fact about the course: there is no speaking paper. Speaking is named in the aims — students should develop it during the course of study, and the specification says outright that there will be no assessment of those skills — but every mark in the qualification is earned by listening, reading, translating and writing. Three externally examined papers are taken in the same May/June series. Paper 1, Translation into English, reading comprehension and writing (research question) in Greek, runs two hours thirty minutes, carries 80 marks and is worth 40 per cent: Section A is an unseen passage translated from Greek into English for 20 marks, Section B is reading for 20 marks across four questions, and Section C is the research question for 40 marks, in which the student reads an unseen Greek text on their own researched subject and responds to a statement about it in roughly 270 to 320 words of Greek. Section C alone is a fifth of the whole A-Level and is the largest single task in the qualification. Paper 2, Translation into Greek 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 Greek for 20 marks, and Sections B and C carry two extended essays of 45 marks each, on either two literary texts or one literary text and one film — never on two films. Paper 3, Listening, reading and writing in Greek, 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 and one read source on the same sub-theme and then evaluates the views in both in 180 to 230 words. Apart from the translation into English, every question in the qualification is set in Greek and must be answered in Greek. The content is four themes, each broken into two sub-themes and one research subject, each of those divided into three aspects, and the specification prints them all in Greek. The scoping rule is unusual and load-bearing, and no other language in this Edexcel family does it: Themes 1, 2 and 4 are set in the context of Greece only, while Theme 3, Όψεις της Κύπρου, is set in the context of Cyprus only. Cyprus is therefore its own society and its own state in this course, with two sub-themes and a research subject of its own, and not an appendix to Greece. Theme 1, Αλλαγές στην ελληνική κοινωνία, covers relationships and the family and the world of work, with Η Παιδεία στην Ελλάδα as its research subject; Theme 2, Τέχνη και πνευματικός πολιτισμός στην Ελλάδα, covers contemporary culture and the media and then tradition, customs and belief, with Το ρεμπέτικο as its research subject; Theme 3, Όψεις της Κύπρου, covers the human and the physical geography of Cyprus, with Ιστορία της Κύπρου 1974–1983 as its research subject; Theme 4, Νέες εξελίξεις στο πολιτικό και οικονομικό πεδίο, covers the economy from 2009 onwards and the political scene, with Πρόσφυγες στην Ελλάδα as its research subject. The independent research is examined inside Paper 1 Section C: the student chooses exactly one research subject, covers all three of its aspects, gathers evidence from at least two authentic sources in Greek, and sits the examination with no dictionary and no research documentation. Two of the four research subjects touch on matters that are contested and, in the case of Cyprus, unresolved, and the specification twice tells teachers to consider cultural sensitivities when advising on the choice — a signal worth taking seriously. Alongside the themes sit a prescribed grammar list in Appendix 2, which unusually contains no syntax section at all but does make the position of the stress itself examinable grammar, and two declared works from the board's list of four literary texts and five films. Assessment objectives are weighted 20 per cent AO1, 30 per cent AO2, 30 per cent AO3 and 20 per cent AO4, and Paper 3 carries the entire AO1 weighting. One decision has to be made before the first Greek word is written, and these notes make it explicitly: Modern Greek is written monotonically. One accent, the τόνος, sits on the stressed syllable of any word of two syllables or more; there are no breathings, no grave, no circumflex and no iota subscript. The monotonic system was adopted for state and school use in 1982, and it is what an examiner expects to read. The polytonic conventions of the A-Level in Classical Greek belong to a different qualification and a different state of the language, and they are not imported here; polytonic appears in these notes only where it is genuinely relevant, in the history of the language question and in the older printed editions a student may meet while researching.

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