Themes
According to the subject guide, the five prescribed themes “provide relevant contexts for study at all levels of language acquisition in the DP, and opportunities for students to communicate about matters of personal, local or national, and global interest.” Given the broad nature of these themes, English B teachers essentially have a blank canvas to design a course based on topics that interest us and our students, but also ones that develop international mindedness and critical thinking skills.
Ultimately, our goal as teachers is to teach the language, not just provide interesting topics for communication. Accordingly, it is necessary to use these topics as vehicles for language acquisition (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, conceptual understanding, BICS/CALP, skills development).
We have broken each of these themes down into topics, each with a range of pages that offer “relevant contexts” through which students can learn the language. You can see each topic as a potential unit of study, or simply select pages of interest that fit your own unit topics.
