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A COMPLETE IB LANGUAGE A GUIDE
The options are:
- Language A: Language and Literature (SL/HL) – First assessment 2021
- Language A: Literature (SL/HL) – First assessment 2021
- Literature and Performance (SL) – First assessment 2024
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Activities to help develop application of seven course concepts
The Assessment in Literature A and Language and Literature A
Paper 1
Tips for Success in Paper 1
Paper 2
Tips for Success in Paper 2
HL Essay
Tips for Success in HL Essay
Individual Oral
Four Assessment Criteria
Option 1: Language A: language and literature HL/SL (First assessment 2021)
Course Description and Aims
In the Language A: language and literature course you will study the complex and dynamic nature of language and explore both its practical and artful dimensions. You will be guided in the exploration of the various ways in which language choices convey meaning. Through close analysis of various text types and literary forms, you will consider your own interpretations as well as the critical perspectives of others. Finally, you will explore how such positions are shaped by cultural belief systems globally.
Option 2: Language A: literature HL/SL (First assessment 2021)
Course Description and Aims
In the Language A: literature course you will explore the literature that has helped to shape cultures throughout history. This course looks at the way literature is constructed, why so, and how readers extract meaning. It focuses on the authors’ context within their culture and belief systems. You will have the opportunity to explore how your own interpretations might be shaped by the context of your own time and place.
This table reflects assessment in both options 1 and 2
– Paper 1: Guided textual analysis
– Format: Guided analysis of unseen passage/passages representing different text types. In the literature course these passages will both be works of literature. In the language and literature course, both passages will be non-literary.
Weight: SL (35%), HL (35%)
Time: SL: 1¼
HL: 2¼
– Format: Comparative essay based on two literary works, written in response to a choice of one out of four questions.
Weight: SL (35%), HL (25%)
Time: SL: 1¼ HL: 2¼
– Format: Written coursework component: 1,200–1,500 word. in the Literature course: one literary work. in the Language and literature course: one literary work or one non-literary body of work
Weight: HL (20%)
Literature: a prepared 10-minute audio recorded oral response on the way that one literary work written in your Language A and one literary work in translation approach a common global issue – followed by 5 minutes of question-and-answer with your teacher.
Weight: HL (30%) SL (20%)
| External Assessment | Format | SL Weighting | HL Weighting | Time Allotment in Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper 1: Guided textual analysis | Guided analysis of unseen passage/passages representing different text types. In the literature course these passages will both be works of literature. In the language and literature course, both passages will be non-literary. | 35% | 35% | SL: 1¼ HL: 2¼ |
| Paper 2: Comparative essay | Comparative essay based on two literary works, written in response to a choice of one out of four questions. | 35% | 25% | SL: 1¾ HL: 1¾ |
| HL Essay | Written coursework component: 1,200–1,500 word essay: in the Literature course: one literary work in the Language and literature course: one literary work or one non-literary body of work | - | 20% | |
| Internal Assessment Individual Oral | Language and Literature: a pre-prepared 10-minute audio recorded oral response on the way that one literary work and one non-literary body of work approach a common global issue – followed by 5 minutes of question-and-answer with your teacher. Literature: a prepared 10-minute audio recorded oral response on the way that one literary work written in your Language A and one literary work in translation approach a common global issue – followed by 5 minutes of question-and-answer with your teacher. | 30% | 20% | 15 minutes |
Option 3: Literature and Performance SL only (First assessment 2024)
The new DP literature and performance course will be taught for the first time in August 2022 with first assessment taking place in May 2024.
This interdisciplinary offering, currently available at SL only, is unique because it constitutes both a Group 1 (Studies and Language and Literature A) and Group 6 (Arts) course. It involves analysis through close reading and writing to inform a practical approach in the elements of theater.
Course Description and Aims FOR OPTION 3
This table reflects assessment in option 3
The table for option 3 is available in the desktop mode
| External Assessment | Format | SL Weighting | Time Allotment In Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paper 1: Comparative Essay | Comparative essay based on two works, written in response to a choice of one out of four questions. | 30% | 1¾ |
| Written assignment | Written coursework component: 2,000 word maximum essay on how the student has explored an excerpt from a play through performance, focusing on significant moments (evidenced by embedded photographs) in which individual performance choices stage the passage’s dramatic features. | 30% | |
| Internal AssessmentTransformative performance and Individual Oral | Each student transforms a passage from a non-dramatic literary work into a live, staged performance in front of an audience as part of a 2-4 member ensemble. The unedited performance is video recorded. After the performance, the student explains the transformative process in a 15-minute audio recorded oral. The first 10 minutes involve the student’s individual explanation of the transformation process; the final 5 minutes involve a question-and-answer session with the teacher. | 40% | Performance = 10 min Individual Oral = 15 min |
All three of these courses are structured by three Areas of Exploration and seven course concepts.
The Areas of Exploration are:
- Readers, writers and text
- Time and space
- Intertextuality: connecting texts
The seven course concepts are:
- Identity
- Culture
- Creativity
- Communication
- Perspective
- Transformation
- Representation
A Guide to Navigating Your Choices
Now that you have a sense of the ideas that unify these three courses, we’ll explore what makes them different so you can make an informed choice. This choice will naturally depend on the courses your school actually offers, including the School-Supported Self-Taught (SSST) option for Literature (offered at Standard Level only), which allows you to take the Literature A course in a language that is not taught at your school. Your school would provide the support necessary to complete this course more independently in your mother tongue. In fact, IB has provided a separate guide for taking this course aimed directly at students so they can follow the course’s structure step by step–your IB Coordinator or Group 1 chair can provide you with this very helpful document.
Here are the major distinctions between the three course options (Language A, Language and Literature A, Literature and performance):
Literature A (including SSST Standard Level as described above) involves 9 works (SL) or 13 works (HL). This course, as its title indicates, focuses exclusively on the literary genres and works associated with the language in which the course is taught–from English, Spanish, and French to Icelandic, Tagalog, and Arabic, and many others. The skills involved here are close reading of texts and their contexts, and communicating the insights you derive from these in written and spoken form. The next section of this web page outlines how these skills will be measured and assessed over this two-year course.
Language and Literature A is structured in exactly the same way as the Literature course, but the number of works is different (4 works at SL and 6 works at HL), and the nature of the content you’ll encounter is unique as well. Whereas the Literature course focuses exclusively on the literature of a specific country/language/culture, this course pairs the critical study of literary texts with the examination of non-literary texts such as films, websites, cartoons, advertisements from a wide range of media, and the like. These non-literary ‘text types’ are grouped into what we call ‘bodies of work’–collections of several works by, for example, a single cartoonist such as Charles Schultz, a specific advertising campaign for a company such as Hewlett-Packard from the US or a commercial product such as Panda Cheese from Egypt, or the French filmmaker Anne Fontaine. By juxtaposing literary and non-literary works, students in this course explore a much wider range of cultural products. If you feel as comfortable interpreting the stylistic and cinematic techniques of a filmmaker as you do the literary techniques of a poet, then this course is for you! The next section of this web page outlines how these skills will be measured and assessed over this two-year course.
Literature and Performance SL, which has been recently overhauled to be consistent in structure with the previous two courses, is an interdisciplinary course that bridges Group 1 (Language A) and Group 6 (Arts). Whereas the other courses focus on forms of assessment that you typically encounter in an advanced literature class, this course, as its title suggests, extends your output into the theatrical and performative realm while maintaining the literary focus of its companion courses. This course combines aspects of IB Theatre into its literary study of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. This means you’ll not only be studying plays but also staging excerpts from them and reflecting on the performative choices you have made; you’ll not only be studying non-dramatic texts such as poems, novels, and travel narratives but also transforming excerpts from them into original staged performances, again reflecting on your artistic page-to-stage recreations. It’s an exciting way to engage with literature, but it requires an enhanced form of imagination and physical creativity for your success. If you enjoy literary study and drama, then this is definitely the course for you! The next section of this web page outlines how these skills will be measured and assessed over this two-year course.
The following activities are designed to help you develop your application of the seven course concepts in ways that will prepare you for all three of the Group 1 course options:
Communication
Students receive a variety of conclusions to literary essays written by IB students (individually printed in hard copy)—they might be from final HL Essays or formative classwork written in Learner Portfolios. (Ideally, these conclusions are based on a work the students have just finished studying in class.) They then rank each one in a visual taxonomy on the wall based on the following prompt: “How effectively does each conclusion communicate the global or even personal implications of the work in our world—the world of today’s readers?”
Creativity
Students choose any dramatic monologue—it doesn’t have to be from a play—and assign a particular physical movement or gesture to each type of punctuation. Each student then needs to determine why the character is making each movement/gesture based on the internal meaning(s) and rhetorical purposes of the monologue. Students can then either explain these physical responses or, better yet, perform/enact their creative decisions.
Representation
Each student chooses a song whose lyrics have personal significance and places a paper copy of these lyrics on the classroom wall. Students are given pieces of paper with these seven course concepts written on them; with tape or bluetack they affix the concepts that they think are triggered by each song’s lyrics. The song’s ‘owner’ then stands infers/explains/interprets the conceptual assignments made by others—to what extent do they represent the song?
Culture
In small teams, students research the etiquette rules and mores of the cultural context of a work they are studying (the world of the work—the time and place in which it was written—rather than the world in the work). Based on this research, the teams showcase a skit in which they dramatize what habits and norms would have been expected among the work’s first audiences(‘eti-can’) and a comedic portrayal of gross violations of these habits and norms (‘eti-can’t’). To what extent do these portrayals of culture resonate today?
Perspective
Every storyteller—the writer, the narrator(s), the character(s)—has a persona based on a set of distinct experiences that shape his/her/their individual world view. Each student picks a specific moment in time in the daily life of this persona (“la vida cotidiana” as said in Spanish) based on a media text, such as a film or audio drama, they are studying in class. Then they assemble a set of physical objects that would likely define this persona’s everyday existence. Students then reflect on each other’s object choices in response to the prompt: “What do these objects suggest about the perspectives that shape this persona’s world view—inwardly and outwardly?” Students seeking an extra challenge might perform an object study in which they interact with these objects by embodying this persona in a specific moment in time and place.
Identity
A student tells another student a personal story about an important event in his/her/their life (about 5 minutes). The student receiving the story listens to and observes the storyteller carefully. The receiver then tells the storyteller’s story in first-person as the storyteller to the wider group—replicating and respecting every detail of the story’s content and manner of delivery as a reflection of the owner’s identity.
Transformation
This is a twist on the ‘ludic exercise’ typically used with poetry to help us understand the impact of diction/writer’s choices on our reception. Each student takes a short poem and digitally removes a key, evocative word from each line (including the title if there is one). Another student, who is unfamiliar with the poem, then fills in the blanks with words inspired by context clues and imagination. The students do this in an exchange of poems, reflecting on each other’s choices in relation to the original poet’s choices. Then each student pretends to be the poet who wrote the original poem; speaking in first-person, the reincarnated ‘poet’ reflects on the transformation from the first/false version to the final version.
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the Assessments in Literature A and Language and Literature A
Paper 1 is an external assessment that you take at the end of the course. It is a skills-based exam that measures your ability to articulate incisive content-form relationships in ways that support your interpretation of the holistic meaning of the passage(s). Literature A students receive two passages representing different literary genres (an excerpt from a play and another from a work of nonfiction, for example)–HLs analyze both while SLs analyze one of the two. Language and Literature students receive two passages representing different non-literary text types (a cartoon and a print advertisement, for example)–HLs analyze both while SLs analyze one of the two.
Here are some tips for success on Paper 1:
➢ Prepare by working on the skills involved in close reading. Doing as many smaller practice runs using outside texts (random and not on your syllabus) as possible is highly recommended! Your teacher and HYC tutors have access to actual past papers you can use as well–alongside examiner-marked student responses to many of these.
➢ Be sure to scan for ALL Literary Devices and have a deep understanding of how and why the most important ones are used in patterns throughout the passage. Spotting and listing devices just because they exist is less effective than concentrating on the ones that have the greatest impact on your holistic interpretation of the passage’s meaning as a whole. Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture as you immerse in the artistry of the writer’s craft–maintain equally focused attention to the forest AND the individual trees within it.
➢ Throughout the course, using practice resources consistently in your Learner Portfolio to correctly embed quotations and to seamlessly connect your ideas through transition words and phrases will set you up for success! Your HYC IB tutors can help you develop these critical skills.
PAPER 2: COMPARATIVE ESSAY
Paper 2 is an external assessment that you take at the end of the course. It is a comparative essay in which you choose any two literary works you have studied in the course–but not the ones you already used in the HL Essay and the Individual Oral–and compare and contrast their content and form in response to one of four prescribed question prompts. Language and Literature students should be careful not to choose non-literary bodies of work for this exam.
Here are some tips for success on Paper 2:
➢ Your examiner will not care what method of comparison-making you choose: the point-by-point method or the block method. However, comparative essays that keep both literary works in consistent conversation in each paragraph typically score higher because the comparative insights are often more sharply focused. Whichever structure you choose, it is important that you have already practiced the skills of effective comparison in your Learner Portfolio using literary texts you are studying in class.
➢ You will not have access to the texts during the exam, so be sure to have a thorough knowledge of at least three texts, ideally with evocative quotes (short phrases from each work) memorized. Comparative essays that include actual passages quoted from each literary work often score higher than those that do not. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
HL ESSAY
The HL Essay in an external assessment. Students taking either of these courses at HL write a 1200-1500 word essay that explores the author’s purpose and how the work/body of work engages one of the seven course concepts. Please be sure not to choose either of the works/body of work you already used in the IO if you did this assessment first. Your role is to discover what the author conveys and how they do it. Some of these investigative phrases are: how does the author construct, convey, comment on, reinforce, etc. Your HYC IB tutor can help you as you strategize your approach to the work/body of work you have chosen. Your essay must be a formal, well-structured analysis of the work/body of work. Your thesis statement must articulate a debatable claim, and your analysis of specific evidence should support this claim while confidently demonstrating your unique and elevated voice.
Here are some tips for success on HL Essay:
➢ Do some research on your author; there are many resources for this, and YouTube often has videos that offer a rich and detailed account of their lives, influences and culture, especially if they are contemporary. While your HL Essay should not be a biography of the author, your understanding of the time and place of the author’s world will enhance the insights you bring to your literary analysis. In other words, your understanding of the world of the text will enhance your understanding of the world represented in the text.
➢ From the beginning of Year 1 to the end of Year 2, use your Learner Portfolio to keep your thoughts organized by theme, literary style used, issues explored, et c. so that you have an exam revision guide all ready for you when you begin the writing process.
➢ Use your conclusion as a place to reflect on the wider implications of the work/body of work–how does your analysis unite reader(s), the writer, and the text? It is ok to use “I” here and offer a more personal reflection on how the work triggers today’s readers in different ways.
INVIDUAL ORAL (IO)
The Individual Oral (IO) is an internal assessment. Please see the separate Individual Oral page on this website for a detailed breakdown of what this new exam entails in both courses.
IB consistently uses four criteria to assess your performance on all the assessments in these two courses:
Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation
Criterion B: Analysis and evaluation
Criterion C: Focus, organization and development
Criterion D: Language
the Assessments in Literature and Performance
PAPER 1: COMPARATIVE ESSAY IN LITERATURE AND PERFORMANCE
Paper 1 is an external assessment that you take at the end of the course. It is a comparative essay in which you choose any two literary works you have studied in the course–but not the ones you already used in the Written Assignment and the Transformative Performance/Individual Oral–and compare and contrast their content and form in response to one of four prescribed question prompts.
Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation
Criterion B: Analysis and evaluation
Criterion C: Focus, organization and development
Criterion D: Language
A maximum of 5 points is awarded for elevated register, impeccable grammar, and a strategic use of literary terminology in your comparative analysis. Your tone must be elevated in register, manifesting a masterly voice of reason, precision and authority. Embedding your excerpts correctly and using a variety of methods to do so is a great way to demonstrate your competence. Why not impress the examiner? Present yourself as a nuanced expert.
Think of this entire process as a creative/critical journey encompassing the following trajectory:
“Inquiring→Developing→Presenting→Evaluating”
Your teacher will guide you through each of these steps, but it’s best to have this evolution in mind before you begin. Don’t rush this. Use your Learner Portfolio to document every stage/step of the page-to-stage creative process so that you have ample material for writing a detailed Written Assignment.
➢ Be sure that the video or photos taken of the performance capture your individual performance–this might require several people taking video/photos at the same time if this is an ensemble piece.
– “the relationship of their character with another”
– “a particular theme or motif presented through their character”
– “the development of their character through the extract”
– “one or more key character traits highlighted through the extract”
– “the role played by their character in the creation or development of tension, emotion, atmosphere or meaning”
– In the essay, after contextualizing the excerpt, organize your main content around the two or three significant moments from your performance that best showcase your staging of the excerpt’s dramatic features.
The Transformative Performance and Individual Oral is an internal assessment. In an ensemble, each student chooses an excerpt from a non-dramatic literary work you have studied in class (such as a poem, short story, or novel) and transforms this excerpt into a live theatrical performance in front of an audience. This performance should focus on how to use the elements of performance to transform the dramatic features of the excerpt into a theatrical piece. This is a student-directed and videoed performance lasting 10 minutes; your teachers are there to support you as a ‘guide on the side’. For this assessment you need to focus on aspects such as:
-The dramatic potential of the non-dramatic work
– Your ensemble’s intentions for the performance–what do you want the audience to feel and experience?
– How will you and your ensemble develop and apply performance elements such as movement, voice, pacing, and blocking to manifest and embody the transformation and thereby fulfill your ensemble’s intentions?
– How will you and your ensemble develop and apply production/stagecraft/design elements such as props, lighting, sound, and costume to manifest the transformation in physical space and time and thereby fulfill your ensemble’s intentions? How are you going to shape the environment for the audience?
After this performance is complete, each student then prepares the individual oral. This is a well-prepared audio recording lasting 15 minutes–10 minutes focusing on the ensemble’s transformative process followed by 5 minutes of question-and-answer with your teacher. In the first 10 minutes you need to do the following:
– demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the extract you have chosen individually
– interpret the dramatic potential of textual features and/or authorial choices within the extract
– explain how your ensemble’s interpretation of textual features informed its staging choices
– evaluate the final piece and the extent to which it met the group’s intentions.
You can bring the following items with you into the recorded exam:
1) An outline on a prescribed form provided by your teacher containing a maximum of 10 bullet-point notes 2) One side of a A4-sized piece of paper containing quotes from the extract or lines from your theatrical transformationHere are some tips for success on the Transformative Performance and Individual Oral:
“Inquiring→Developing→Presenting→Evaluating”
➢ Practice a version of your IO over Zoom with us so you can look for areas of improvement.
Criterion A: Individual contributions to the performance: A maximum of 8 points is awarded for your command of performance elements and how it contributes to the overall impact of the transformative theatrical production of the excerpt from the non-dramatic literary work. This criterion is based on your contribution to the live performance itself.
Criterion B: Knowledge and understanding of the extract: A maximum of 4 points is awarded for demonstrating your nuanced understanding of the overall meaning and purpose of the excerpt in the IO.
Criterion C: Interpretation and transformation of the extract: A maximum of 8 points is awarded for analyzing the dramatic potential of the excerpt based on its textual features/authorial choices in the IO; integrating and interpreting specific textual evidence is important here.
Criterion D: Evaluation of the final production: A maximum of 4 points is awarded for explaining in the IO how well your ensemble met its performance intentions for the audience. (You might consider incorporating verbatim/quoted audience feedback into this part of your IO as evidence.)
Criterion E: Focus and organization: A maximum of 4 points is awarded for the effectiveness of your IO’s organization and structure. Does it cover all of the required content in a balanced, well-paced, and coherent manner?
Criterion F: Language: A maximum of 4 points is awarded for elevated register, impeccable grammar, and a strategic use of both literary and performance terminology in your spoken delivery. You should manifest a masterly voice of reason, precision, and authority. Integrating your excerpts correctly and using a variety of methods to do so is a great way to demonstrate your competence. Present yourself as a nuanced expert of both literature and theatrical performance.
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