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Multivocality
The Language and Literature course is all about texts and their meanings. A fundamental understanding – arguably the main understanding – of the course is that students come to appreciate that the meaning...
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Multivocal
Multivocal literally means 'many-voiced'. The term can be usefully employed when discussing the nature of texts and their meanings. Multivocality suggests that meaning is not fixed 'in' a text in any...
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Language of war Free
In our studies of language in a cultural context, we can explore the culture of war. Just as every industry has its jargon, every region has its accent and every social group has its slang, so too does...
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Extended Essay in Studies in Language Free
Exams are over, at least for Language and Literature, if not for all subjects. It remains, however, a hectic time for students in my school. My grade 11s are beginning to think about Individual Oral...
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Topics Free
The IB has stipulated several suggested topics for Part 1. You may want to cover a few of them in depth or more of them in passing. When studying a particular topic, it is important that we have many...
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P1 SL (The Language of African Literature)
The following Paper 1 sample was written in response to an extract from ‘The Language of African Literature’ by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. It is a well-known essay; a search of Google reveals in excess of 54,000...
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On Taking Exams Free
I have a young colleague. I value his insight. As people go, he's fairly phlegmatic. But not the other day. The other day he seemed unsettled by something. So, I 'enquired' about what it was that was...
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Accent
'Accent' refers to the pronunciation of a language. The word accent is often confused with dialect, which refers to more than a variation of pronunciation. Dialect refers to a unique variety of vocabulary,...
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What Makes Us Laugh? Free
I've been teaching for quite a long time. I've seen a few things. I don't, however, think that I have ever witnessed a student laugh whilst reading an exam paper during an exam in an exam hall. Perhaps...
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Understanding Modality Free
There is a story. George Orwell, the famous writer, shot an elephant whilst serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. This event forms the basis for Orwell's essay 'Shooting an Elephant'. Not everyone,...