by Mark McGowan

When the last iteration of the ToK syllabus was released, I created an image to communicate the idea of Knowledge and the Knower.  

I called it The Communication Relationship.  It depicts one person trying to communicate something to another.  That could be an artist, a scientist, a historian, a teacher, a politician – anyone.  What is in the box could be a work of art, a scientific or economic theory, a mathematical principle or anything else that one person would like to communicate to another.  

The success of this relationship depends on many factors – previous knowledge, cultural contexts, perceptions, emotions, imagination; the list is endless. I realized that this idea can be applied to any IB course as that is what teachers do: transfer knowledge.  It is also what we ask our English B students to accomplish, whether it is writing, speaking, reading or listening – to understand how one person, through language or images, communicates with a specific audience for a specific purpose.  As I reflected upon how we attempt to teach our students competencies and conceptual understanding, I thought perhaps The Communication Relationship could be valuable for teachers and students when attempting to explain or practice certain aspects of the course.  

Writing

For the Paper 1 writing task, students must choose a certain text type to address a situation.  The text type could be a variety of written forms, such as an informal email to a friend, a formal letter to a city council, or a speech to a class or a group of parents. To succeed in this task, a student must understand the Context, Audience and Purpose of the task. In regard to The Communication Relationship, they must imagine what one person would write to another, or to a group, and with which language.  This is what determines the success of the communication between the writer and their audience.

For example:

Dear Mr. Harrington,

I am writing to you in regard to the problem of cyberbullying that our school community is facing, and I would like to propose a solution for how the school can reduce this problem.  

Writer = student

Reader = School Principal

Text = formal language (no contractions), identifying “our community” with a “proposal”.

Our recent page on writing a proposal to school officials regarding cyberbullying highlights this process.

Speaking

For speaking tasks, students are asked to either look at a photograph or read a text and discuss that with their teacher.  In both cases, the student must select information in the texts, whether that is visual or written, and use that to communicate ideas on culture and/or context to an adult.  In addition, they must engage in a conversation based on a course theme.

Our recent blog post on the Individual Oral highlights strategies such as  Visible Thinking’s See-Think-Wonder approach in identifying cultural signifiers.  Once again, success requires a student's ability to decode and select and then organize and communicate their ideas with effective language. They must also respond appropriately to follow-up questions. 

For instance:

A HL student might say, “On line 12, the woman is described as ‘hunched over, devoid of all emotion’, which implies that she has given up hope.” 

An SL student might be asked:  “Have you ever been/would you like to go to this Anglophone culture?”

Again, there is:

• Reader
• Text
• Listener/interviewer 

Success is dependent upon students' ability to either use an extract to develop an opinion or, in the Q&A, to offer personal interpretation. 

Reading

To improve reading comprehension, English B students are taught to be able to comprehend meaning, tone and word choice in a variety or texts for a variety of purposes.  In order to develop this skill, students are asked to look at the relationship between words in a sentence and to seek indicators that allow them to decipher meaning.  

In our short story series, we use literature to improve students’ ability to imply, place words in sentences and guess words’ meanings in relation to their context.  

The following is taken from our page on the short story, “Names/Nombres”:

“My initial desire to be known by my correct Dominican name faded. I  

_________   wanted to be Judy and merge with the Sallys and the Janes in my class.”

The student is simultaneously understanding who the narrator is, what she is saying and how language is used.

Listening

In the listening exercises, students hear three different audio recordings with various voices in different contexts.  They must understand what one person is trying to communicate to another, as well as how and why people communicate.  This activity requires a slightly different skill set as the language cannot be seen on a page.  Nonetheless, the cues to effective listening are similar to those when writing or reading.

One of the questions for an audio text on our page HL Listening Exam 5, is:  

The study by Dan Ariely found that…     

A. The more people were offered as an incentive, the worse they did on a task.  

B. The bigger the reward, the better people performed.  

C. The reward made them focus hard on the task.  

In the listening exam, the students can read the questions first.  They can wait to hear when Dan Ariely’s name is mentioned, then they must decipher what he says about “a reward” or “an incentive”.

Does the student know what the word “incentive” means?  If not, they can focus on the comparative:  “the more people were offered…”; “the bigger the reward …”; or “the reward made them …”

Once again, It’s:

• Speaker
• Language
• Student