Musings On…The Individual Oral
Tuesday 11 February 2025
By Joe O'Callaghan
With the M25 exam session rapidly approaching, some teachers may have completed their Individual Oral Assessments (IOAs) and turned their attention to exam revision. For others, though - myself included! - this aspect of the course still needs to be undertaken. You can read all about approaches to the IOA here and a detailed unpacking of the criteria here. In this blog, though, I’d like to offer my reflections on some specifics that you may find helpful as you administer your own IOAs in the coming weeks.
When approaching the planning, I get my Standard Level students to use the See-Think-Wonder visible thinking routine, as outlined on the guest page from Laurie Holden, Scaffolding skills for the SL Oral. It is especially effective when you guide students to think about connections to an Anglophone culture. The examiner reports in recent years have expressed that this element is often lacking, limiting students to the 3-4 band in Criterion B1. The 5-6 band requires that “the presentation is consistently relevant to the stimulus and draws on explicit and implicit details.” Part of this means the students must make “clear links to the target culture(s).” If you haven’t done this explicitly as part of your course, there is still time! Make sure that students can connect any image you give them to a unit topic and a specific aspect of Anglophone culture, such as attitudes, beliefs, customs, or traditions. The themes of Identities and Experiences perhaps lend themselves best to this.
Likewise, for the Higher Level assessment, hitting the top band requires students to make “effective use of the extract to develop and support observations and opinions.” During the 20-minute planning time, I encourage students to highlight the specific quotations they are going to use. Of course, they can paraphrase and still achieve this, but saying something like, “On line 12, the woman is described as ‘hunched over, devoid of all emotion’, which implies that she has given up hope.” By signposting the quotation, the examiner’s attention is drawn to the evidence, which could be crucial if the candidate’s IOA is requested for moderation. Also, by highlighting and numbering the quotations, students don’t need to write the quotation in their bullet points, wasting valuable time that would better be used to run through their presentation.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the discussion portions of the IOA, as each teacher will have focused on different topics throughout the course and have students of varying levels and interests. However, there are some principles we can follow to ensure the student has the best possible chance to show off their English ability.
To begin with - and this is especially important with more nervous students - our first question shouldn’t be too challenging. We want to ease students into the discussion, so starting with a question that is too cognitively demanding isn’t really fair. One approach here is to get the students to speak from their own perspective. For HL students, I often ask, “How did you feel when you read this extract?” This allows for a subjective response that encourages empathy. After that, we can move on to more analytical questions about such aspects as word choice, characterisation, and themes. For SL students, I might ask, “Have you ever been/would you like to go to this Anglophone culture?” Again, this encourages a personal response rather than a more abstract cultural analysis. This approach also has the added bonus of encouraging "personal interpretations", as is required for the 5-6 band in Criterion B2.
Another skill I have my students practise at both HL and SL is using a framework to develop their answers. The PEE(L) approach, which is so common in essay writing, can also be applied here. It encourages a logical expression of ideas, which can help students hit the top band for Criterion B2, explicitly addressing the descriptor “responses are consistently appropriate and developed.”
Finally, for Criterion C, we can train our students to spot opportunities to make “independent contributions”, a requirement for the 5-6 band. This is all about taking control of the conversation and steering it in potentially new directions. One technique I explicitly teach is responding to questions about advantages or disadvantages. For instance, if I ask a student, “What are some advantages to virtual classrooms?” they can outline the advantages but then choose to explore some disadvantages without me prompting them to do so. Alternatively, they could answer the original question and then highlight the benefits of face-to-face learning that make it a better option for most young people.
Ultimately, the best thing you can do to prepare students for the IOA is to give them plenty of opportunities to practise these approaches, strategies, and techniques. If you have a small cohort, you might be able to conduct extra mock oral interviews. For larger groups, an effective method is having students work in groups of three with one member as a student, another playing the teacher’s role, and a third giving feedback, rotating after each interview.
For further inspiration and practice, check out our latest two new pages on the site:
The first in our new collection of short stories for the Higher Level Course - The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. This includes an extract with examples of the types of questions that could be asked in part 2.
A page relating to the theme of Identities - Tattoos on Dark Skin Tones. This includes a series of discussion questions that serve as a model for open-ended questions that will (hopefully!) get your students talking.