How can a holiday in Spain help with GCSE Spanish?

The GCSE speaking exam rewards spontaneous, unscripted speech. Ordering food, asking for directions and making small purchases in Spanish give exactly that practice, in situations that cannot be rehearsed word for word.

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Jul 14, 2026

A Family Holiday in Spain Is GCSE Spanish Speaking Practice — If You Do These 10 Things

Written by Ana-Maria Ciui, a GCSE Spanish teacher and speaking examiner, this article gives ten specific things a family can do while on holiday in Spain that build the skills assessed in the GCSE speaking exam. It also explains what recently changed in the exam and why spontaneous speech now matters more.

Ana-Maria Ciui

GCSE Spanish Teacher and Examiner

Founder of Ciui Training. I teach Spanish and French and have experience marking GCSE Spanish speaking examinations.

You have already booked it. The flights, the apartment, the ten days somewhere warm with a pool and too much sun cream. Somewhere in the house there is a Year 10 who has just finished their exams, who will spend most of those ten days horizontal, and who will sit their GCSE Spanish next summer.

Here is the thing almost no parent has been told: the holiday you have already paid for is the single best speaking practice your child can get. Not because you are going to make them revise on the beach. You are not. But because the GCSE changed — and it changed in a direction that makes a real Spanish holiday worth more than an evening with a vocabulary list.

I teach Spanish, and I have read the new specifications end to end. Let me tell you what changed, and then let me give you ten things to do that cost nothing, take minutes, and will not start an argument.

What changed in the exam

The GCSE was reformed. The new specifications were taught from September 2024, and the first examinations were sat in summer 2026. Students beginning Year 11 in September 2026 will sit the reformed examination in summer 2027.

For Pearson Edexcel, the speaking assessment is worth 25% of the GCSE and is built around three tasks: a read-aloud task, a role play and a picture task followed by conversation. Other examination boards organise their speaking assessments slightly differently, so parents should check which board their child is studying.

25%Speaking’s share of the Pearson Edexcel GCSE

3Main tasks in the Pearson Edexcel speaking examination

NEWDictation section in Listening

2026First examinations for the reformed specification

Read those three tasks again, and think about what a holiday actually consists of.

For Pearson Edexcel, the role play is set in a transactional situation — a shop, a café, a station, a pharmacy. That is not an exercise. That is Tuesday.

The read-aloud is there to check whether a student knows how Spanish letters actually sound: that c and z are not English sounds, that ll and ñ and j behave in ways English never prepares you for, that the h is silent. A menu is a reading-aloud task with olives next to it.

And the conversation is the part that matters most, because of what it no longer allows.

Whatever the examination board, students must respond to language and questions that they cannot simply memorise word for word. There is no single script that can carry them through the whole assessment. A student who has only ever recited cannot recite their way through this.

Prepared language still helps, but students must be able to adapt it, answer follow-up questions and recover when the conversation moves away from their prepared response.

That is the real change, and it is the one that should make a parent look differently at ten days in Spain. What is rewarded now is a student who can hear a question they did not expect and say something. Anything. Fluently enough, quickly enough, with an opinion attached.

You cannot cram that. You can only use it.

Ten things to do in Spain

None of these is homework. Nobody needs a pen. Most take under a minute, and every one of them is a rehearsal for a task in the exam.

1

Stop ordering for them

This is the whole article in one instruction. You order for yourself; they order for themselves. Do not translate, do not rescue, do not fill the silence. Let it be slightly awkward. The awkwardness is the exercise.

Para mí, el pollo, por favor.
Role play
2

Make them ask for something that isn’t on the table

Water, bread, the bill, another fork. In the role play, students may be asked to ask a question rather than only answer one. Asking is a different muscle, and most students have never used it outside a classroom.

¿Nos trae la cuenta, por favor?
¿Tiene pan?
Role play · asking a question
3

Hand over the tickets

Bus, metro, museum, sunbeds. Two tickets, one adult, one child, return not single. Numbers under pressure, in a queue, with someone waiting behind you — that is precisely the condition the exam recreates.

Dos billetes de ida y vuelta, por favor.
Role play · numbers
4

Get properly lost, on purpose

Put the phone away and have them ask a stranger. The point is not the directions. The point is that they will not understand the whole answer, and they will have to cope — which is exactly what an unseen question feels like.

Perdone, ¿dónde está la playa?
¿Puede repetir, más despacio?
Conversation · coping strategies
5

Read the menu out loud

Before anyone orders, they read three dishes aloud. That is the read-aloud task, with churros. Listen for the sounds English gets wrong: gazpacho, paella, jamón, cerveza, ajo.

jamón · paella · cerveza · ajo
Read aloud · phonics

A cafe on a Spanish street with outdoor tables — the everyday setting where GCSE Spanish speaking practice really happens: reading the menu aloud, ordering, and asking for the bill

The exam calls it a role play in a transactional setting. Everyone else calls it lunch.

6

Send them into the farmacia

Sun cream, plasters, something for a headache. A role play with an actual problem to solve and a real consequence if it goes wrong — which is more motivating than any worksheet I have ever set.

Necesito crema solar, factor cincuenta.
Role play · transactional
7

Ask “why” at dinner

Not “did you like it” — why. An opinion with a reason attached is worth more marks than a perfect sentence with nothing behind it. Get them used to never stopping at “sí”.

Me gustó porque…
No me gustó nada porque…
Conversation · opinion + justification
8

Describe the photo they just took

They will take four hundred. Pick one, and ask: what is happening in it? Who is there, what are they doing, what is the weather like? That is essentially the picture task, and they can practise it in the queue for ice cream.

En esta foto hay… · Están…
Picture task
9

Write down one thing you hear

A station announcement, a football score, the daily special on a chalkboard. Have them write it as they hear it. In the reformed GCSE, Listening now contains a dictation section — students transcribe spoken Spanish into written Spanish — and almost nobody is practising it.

Listening · dictation
10

Let them get it wrong in front of you

This is the hardest one, and it is the one that matters. A teenager who is allowed to be clumsy in a café in July becomes a teenager who is not frightened in a speaking exam in May. Confidence is not a personality trait. It is a memory of having survived it before.

All of it

One reassurance, from the mark scheme itself. Parents worry their child will be marked down for sounding English. They will not. The Pearson Edexcel guidance is explicit: students are not assessed on the quality of their Spanish accent — an anglicised accent will not affect success, as long as the pronunciation is clear and comprehensible and the letter-sounds are right. Your child does not need to sound Spanish. They need to be understood. There is an enormous difference, and it should take the pressure off both of you.

And then September comes

Here is the honest part, and it is the reason I wrote this.

Ten days in Spain will do something no revision guide can: it will prove to your child that the Spanish in their head is real — that it buys ice cream, finds a beach, gets the sun cream. That is worth more than a term of vocabulary tests, and it costs you nothing you have not already spent.

But a holiday is not a syllabus. It will not teach them the tenses they are missing, or the vocabulary the reformed GCSE is built on, or how to structure a piece of writing under time. It gives them the confidence. It does not give them the content.

That is the bit that starts in September — and Year 11 is short. It is genuinely short: a couple of terms, mock exams inside them, and then it is May.

Use the summer for confidence. Use the year for everything else.

That is where structured teaching takes over.

The Ciui Training Spanish GCSE course for Years 10 and 11 provides the structured second half of that journey. It is built around the reformed specification and includes guided lessons, examination practice, speaking activities, audio support and vocabulary development.

See the Spanish GCSE course for Years 10–11

For now, though: go. Sit in the sun. Let them order the churros.

Examination information in this article is based on publicly available GCSE specifications for first teaching from September 2024 and first examination in summer 2026. Assessment structures and terminology vary between awarding bodies. Parents and students should check the specification used by their school.

Ciui Training is an independent provider and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any awarding body.

Common questions

How can a holiday in Spain help with GCSE Spanish?: The GCSE speaking exam rewards spontaneous, unscripted speech. Ordering food, asking for directions and making small purchases in Spanish give exactly that practice, in situations that cannot be rehearsed word for word.

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