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Individual Oral Commentary (SL) Shooting an Elephant (2)
The extract for this Individual Oral Commentary (IOC) is from George Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’. For teacher’s who would like to use this exemplar with their students, it is perhaps desirable,...
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Individual Oral Commentary (SL) The Great Gatsby
The following individual oral commentary is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Students may not be familiar with novel (although perhaps they should be!). Nevertheless, students can...
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Individual Oral Commentary (HL) The Remains of the Day
The following individual oral commentary is based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. The IOC is a practice activity done in advance of the examined IOC. At least one full practice IOC...
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Skills
Paper 1 requires certain skills. Not only must you understand the text(s), but also you have to express your ideas in a well-structured commentary. Like any skill, commentary writing can be perfected...
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Comparative Commentaries to Go: Death Rituals
Type ‘funeral + quotations’ into Google and you’ll get somewhere in the region of 20 million hits. Hardly surprising. Aphorisms, witty and otherwise, abound where funerals are concerned. Both texts...
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Essays of Interest
Teachers - good teachers, that is - have a problem, and they cannot help themselves. To wit: In just about everything they read, good teachers identify something, one way or another, to bring to their...
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Should Literature be Considered Useful?
It is perhaps not widely known that the late Robin Williams inspired many to turn to the teaching profession following his performance as John Keating, the inspirational, if unconventional teacher in...
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Comparative Commentaries to Go: Brain Gym
Teachers of English A: Language and Literature may wish to roll up their Theory of Knowledge sleeves before tackling the next comparative commentary with students. The texts on this page are concerned...
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Comparative Commentaries to Go: Gravity
The second in the series of comparative commentaries to go is thematically connected by the notion of gravity. The first text is Roger McGough's moving poem, 'Defying Gravity', a poem that Poetry Magazine...
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Comparative Commentaries to Go: Glasgow
Following from the earlier publication of ‘texts to go’, the website is now set to publish a range of Comparative Textual Analyses in a new section called, appropriately enough, ‘comparative commentaries...