Selected student pages
Review/revision
Paper 1
Paper 1 is an examination that requires students to write a guided textual analysis from an unseen non-literary text or extract. The exam will contain two unseen non-literary texts or extracts. Key...
Review/revision
Individual oral
The individual oral is a 10-minute oral followed by five minutes of questions by your teacher. It is worth 20% of the your final IB grade if you are a Higher Level student and 30% of your final mark...
Assessment
HL Essay: Exemplar 9 (The World's Wife)
The Higher Level (HL) Essay published on this page is good in all respects, but there are obvious opportunities for further improvement. It is written on Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems – popular...
Assessment
Doing Textual Analysis: Representing People Free
This page will help you develop your skills in doing this thing that we call textual analysis. The page focuses on the ways that language is often used in texts to represent people. We suggest that meanings...
eBook
Sports Columns (a Body of Work)
Love him or hate him, the sports columnist Rick Reilly has had a prolific career. He wrote the “Life of Reilly” column—appearing on the back page of Sports Illustrated from 1997-2007—and then continued...
eBook
Mental Health and Wellbeing: 1. A Role for Reading and Writing?
Over the next few weeks and months – writing in August 2020 – we will create a unit of study on the topic of mental health and wellbeing. The unit takes a broad focus. We explore, for example, the representation...
eBook
Mental Health and Wellbeing: 2. The Yellow Wallpaper
In the first part of our unit of study on mental health and wellbeing, we offered an opportunity to consider the role of reading and writing in the promotion of mental health. The unit will conclude with...
eBook
15 Essential Literary Terms
This page lists 15 vocabulary words that are essential to our course. You should be able to not only define these terms and notice them in your reading(s), but also analyze how they are used to create...
Assessment
Preparing for Paper 1: More Sportswriting
This page provides straightforward extension opportunities for students who have already completed the lesson on Preparing for Paper 1: Sportswriting. After the earlier lesson, teachers may like to use...
eBook
Patterns in Literature - Parallelism and Deviation
In an earlier scheme of work – see Literature: Challenging Perspectives – the essence of language art was the central concern. The focus of the activities foregrounded a debate between those who claim...
Assessment
HL Essay: Exemplar 2 (White Noise)
Ask a teacher whether we should teach critical theory to IB Language and Literature students and the answers you receive are as wide ranging and diverse as the theories that exist. It is worth reflecting,...
eBook
Blind Date, and When Paul Met Jonathan: An Introduction to the Concept of Perspective
1982 was a particularly turbulent year in the United Kingdom. The national unemployment rate was around 11%, moving upwards, and the country went to war with Argentina over the South American country’s...