Text type expectations
What should we be teaching our students about the text types required under the 2018 Subject Guide?
To put it another way, how will they be expected to handle each text type in Paper 1: Productive skills - writing? Basically, what instructions do we give the students ... what plans do we provide them, so that they can construct something that will fly ?
Command of text types is assessed principally under Criterion C: Conceptual understanding (see the page Writing criteria, unpacked ). This criterion includes the following general areas:
- context, audience, purpose - normally, as set out in the question
- register and tone - generally implied by the norm in the type of text, but may be altered by the nature of the task
- conventions - the standard techniques of format, address, rhetoric, structure, etc
The task involves a "choice of text type" which demonstrates "appropriate" understanding, and handling, of the general areas. So, students have to be taught how the general areas apply to each of the text types - and then how to adapt the general characteristics of each text type to the particular requirements of each specific task / question.
Key Issue: the meaning of 'appropriate'
It would appear that the most important factor in choosing the right text type is to think about whether the text type will reach correctly the specified audience. This in turn means that students should understand where each text type is used, and for which purpose.
- To illustrate, if the task is to explain a personal experience to a friend ... and the options are # Speech; # News report; and # E-mail ... it would be inappropriate to choose the first two, and appropriate to choose the last.
Each text type page has a box entitled 'Appropriate?' - this contains guidance about how and why this text type would be 'appropriate' to particular sorts of task.
Here is an example of what the box looks like ...
Appropriate?
A blog will be appropriate if the task requires you to ... (+ explanation of when the text type would be appropriate)
Not to be confused with...
'article' or 'opinion column' or 'essay' ... (+ explanation of why these possibly similar text types would not be appropriate)
Text type pages
As you can see from the index at top left, all the text types that may be used in examinations have a dedicated page.
Each page sets out to provide brief summary notes about the likely expectations of how Conceptual understandings should be applied to each text type included in the IB-specified list of text types for exams (see the page Exam list of text types ). These notes are organised as follows:
Key features
This box provides the important elements to remember about each text type, thus -
- context, audience, purpose
- register and tone
- conventions - (the first three in the list will be the most likely to be expected in marking)
'Appropriate?'
This box contains advice about how to choose each text type as the most 'appropriate' for the task required by the question, from the choice of three presented.
In addition, the key features are developed in more detail, in this section:
Format and approach, discussed
The recognisable features of each text type have been organised according to two categories :-
Basic Format ... the most easily visible (and teachable) features of the text type - 'format' in the sense of layout, the physical organisation of the script
I list all of the common features that I can think of; not all of these would need to be present for the text type to be clearly recognisable.
Approach ... the less visible features of how the text type would normally be handled - register, author's voice and tone, address to audience, organisation of ideas, and so on.
I list major elements, in descending order of importance (most important, in my view, first). Again, not all of these need to be present - indeed in some cases, some of the approaches may be contradictory and would need to be selected according to the precise nature of the task.
The Basic Format elements can easily be taught and even the weakest students should be able to reproduce them. The Approach elements are intrinsically more difficult to teach, since they often involve quite sophisticated mental procedures - but surely students should be appropriately challenged with these.
- Finally, note that I regularly refer to 'an exam script', in the context of defining what a 'good' version of the text type should display. This is simply being realistic - the point of this list is not primarily to teach students how to write, for example, good diaries in real life, but rather how to be able to produce a realistic version of a diary in an exam.
Relevant writing purposes
Links are provided to the most useful of the skills presented in the writing purposes section, for teaching approaches, examples and models.
Resources
Finally, the following resources relevant to the text type are provided:-
* Materials & models ... blue boxes like this contain links to selected examples of each text type, elsewhere in the site
* Suggested 'new style' exam tasks ... cream boxes like this provide tasks in the format of the current Guide's assessment system - in each of these tasks, the required 'appropriate' text type is the one to which the page is dedicated.
* Recent exam tasks ('old' style) ...pink boxes like this contain examples of how each text type has been set in Paper 2.
Note - at present, all these examples are 'old style' i.e. written according to the old Paper 2 Writing which applied up to November 2019. So, you shouldn't set these as they stand for student practice purposes. However, you can adapt and re-write them, always remembering that :-
1. You need to make clear the expected audience
2. There should be three actions that the student should perform - e.g. 'describe...' + 'explain...' + 'comment...'
3. Three optional text types should be provided - chosen so that there is an appropriate text type (the one you want the students to choose) + a generally appropriate text type (one that might be more or less suitable, but not really) + an inappropriate text type (one that is evidently unsuitable for audience and purpose)
Writing practice TASKS
Under each text type, there is a page which provides a task which enables the student to carry out basic practice in producing that text type.
Each of these pages includes:
The task - Note that the task is not written as in the real IB Paper 1 Writing exam. It does not provide three options for the student to choose from - the purpose of the exercise is precisely to focus on practising that one text type. This means that you cannot apply Criterion C in full: you can't apply the first bullet point about 'choice', but you can apply the other two, about 'Register and tone' and 'Conventions'.
Heading: 'Approach, with tips' - This section provides general advice on the nature of the text type, and the basic principles of how to write it
Heading: 'Exploration' - Suggestions for how the student should tackle the job of thinking out ideas in preparation, and of how to fit those ideas to the requirements of the task.
Heading: 'Organising and planning' - Suggestions for how to organise preparatory exploratory notes into a clear and effective running order for the text.
Online writing exercise - for students to write and submit the practice through Student Access
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