English A: Language and Literature

In English A: Language and Literature you actively engage with language and culture, and thus with how we see and understand the world. You learn to think critically about the interactions between text, audience and purpose in a wide range of fields such as canonised literature, government propaganda, advertising, movies, cartoons, social networks, YouTube, blogs and similar aspects of today's media reality. You develop skills in analysis and learn to appreciate the aesthetics of verbal and visual texts. You will also develop your language skills further and practise academic and creative writing, rhetoric, presenting, performances and role-plays – skills that also help you excel in your other IB DP subjects.

The curriculum revolves around the three official assessment objectives:

• Know, understand and interpret
• Analyse and evaluate
• Communicate

Studies in this course revolve around three Areas of Exploration (AOE):

• Readers, writers and texts
• Time and space
• Intertextuality: connecting texts

In every AOE, the seven central concepts of the course are considered: identity, culture, creativity, communication, perspective, transformation and representation. In every AOE we study literature (including literature in translation) and language, using a wide range of texts that give us the opportunity to:

• explore how language develops in specific cultural contexts and how it shapes individual and group identity;
• examine different forms of communication, the potential for educational, political or ideological influence, and the way mass media use language and image to inform, persuade or entertain;
• consider the relationship between literature and issues at large, such as gender, power, identity, and literary and cultural traditions;
• develop awareness of the rich complexities of texts and the intricacies of their construction;
• explore literary works in detail and analyse elements such as theme, ethical stance or moral value.

Standard-level students read four literary works (novels, plays, collections of short stories or poems, etc.); higher-level students read six works. Both study a number of non-literary Bodies of Work (BoWs) alongside the literary texts. The text choices differ every year – recent examples include the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the novel Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona, and speeches by Malala Yousafzai and Nelson Mandela. The course can be organised in different ways and does not necessarily follow an AOE-by-AOE structure.

As in all courses, regular attendance and active participation are key. This includes classroom discussion, graded and ungraded presentations, group work and similar activities. Throughout the course you keep a portfolio in which you reflect on every text studied in class, and you do written and oral mock exams regularly.

The final exams consist of two written exams (Paper 1 and Paper 2; external assessment) and an oral exam (the Individual Oral; internal assessment). As a higher-level student, you also write an academic essay (the HL Essay; external assessment).

This course requires genuine interest in literature, a wide range of texts and the media. You need basic knowledge of how to read literature and how to speak about language. Both your analytical and your creative side will be challenged. To prepare – read! Read the news, read political and cultural (online) magazines or blogs, and read books that interest you, be it graphic novels, historical fiction, romance literature or non-fiction.