Grade 12 English Home Language past papers and memos

On this page. There are 127 Grade 12 English Home Language past papers here, from 2014 to 2026, and they come with their memos. Some people call them exam papers or previous question papers. They are the same thing. Every one is a free PDF and none of them ask you to sign up.

Yes. Look under September in each year. The September papers are the trial exams. Some schools call them prelims and some call them preparatory exams. Each province sets its own, so you can practise on more than one.

Yes. The memo, which is the marking guideline the examiners use, sits on the same row as the paper it belongs to, so you download the two together rather than hunting for them separately.

The Department of Basic Education, the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and North West. Every paper here was set by an education department. Some departments put their papers online, and we take those from the department. Others do not, so we find their papers elsewhere and check each one against its cover before we add it. If you cannot find your province, a national paper is set to the same CAPS curriculum and is just as good to practise on.

Paper 1 is out of 70 marks and you get 2 hours to write it. It covers 3 areas: Comprehension; Summary; Language structures and conventions. The marks for each one are set out above.

Every term the department published one for. Term 4 is the November exams, Term 3 is the September exams, Term 2 is the May/June exams, Term 1 is the Feb/March exams. Each paper in the list is labelled both ways, so it does not matter whether your school talks in terms or in months.

No. These are NSC papers, set by the Department of Basic Education and the provinces for the government curriculum, CAPS. If you are at an IEB school the content overlaps a great deal, but the papers are set separately and are not on this page.

The newest one. Start with 2026 and work backwards. The examiners who set the most recent papers are the ones setting yours, and how they word a question matters as much as what it is about.