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IB DP English A: Language and Literature | SL & HL | Area of Exploration 2: Time and Space | Topic: Global Issues & the Wider World
📋 What You Will Learn
- Define global issue precisely — significant, transnational and relevant to everyday contexts — and distinguish it from a mere theme or topic
- Map the five fields of inquiry and give concrete examples of texts that engage each one, drawing on the Philpot and Tandy/Gibbons/Koszary course companions
- Explain the mechanism by which texts engage global issues — through content, form, context of production and reception — and demonstrate this in close analysis
- Apply the Ladder of Abstraction to move from a broad topic toward a precise, essay-ready global issue statement for the Individual Oral
- Perform two worked micro-analyses (one literary, one non-literary) showing how textual choices construct a global issue rather than merely illustrate it
- Connect the concept of global issues to Paper 1 (/20), Paper 2 (/30) and the Individual Oral (/40), identifying the specific criteria involved
🔍 Guiding Question When a text engages a global issue, is it illustrating something that already exists in the world, or is it actively constructing — even shaping — how that issue is understood? And how does your answer change what you analyse in the exam?
🌍 Why This Matters The Individual Oral — worth 40 marks and assessed on how a global issue is presented through content and form — is the assessment most directly shaped by this subtopic. But the concept also drives Paper 1: examiners routinely choose unseen texts that are in dialogue with global concerns (inequality, climate, displacement, power). Being fluent in the five fields of inquiry means you walk into Paper 1 already oriented. And in Paper 2, a sharp thesis about two studied works requires you to name the exact pressure-point of the global issue, not simply say "both texts deal with identity."
1 · Defining a Global Issue
📖 Definition — Global Issue A global issue is an issue that is significant (it has consequences beyond the personal), transnational (it crosses national and cultural borders) and relevant to everyday contexts (it touches the lives of real people, not just abstract systems). As Brad Philpot (Cambridge, 2019) puts it, global issues are the connective tissue between