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IB DP English A: Language and Literature | SL & HL | Area of Exploration 2: Time and Space | Concepts: perspective, representation, communication
📋 What You Will Learn
- Distinguish between the author's perspective, the narrator or speaker's point of view, and the perspectives of individual characters — and explain why conflating them is a critical error
- Identify and analyse the four main narrative points of view (first person, third-person limited, omniscient, and the unreliable narrator) and evaluate their effects on meaning, reader trust, and sympathy
- Explain how framing — through deliberate selection, omission, ordering and emphasis — constructs a partial version of reality in both literary and non-literary texts
- Name and apply the five key linguistic markers of bias that Philpot identifies in the Cambridge course companion: weasel words, glittering generalities, euphemism, dysphemism, and loaded language
- Detect and interrogate bias systematically in news media, political rhetoric, advertising and literary narrative by using a contextual, evidence-based reading strategy
- Apply your understanding of perspective and bias directly to Paper 1 unseen analysis (/20, criteria A–D) and to comparative arguments in Paper 2 (/30)
🔍 Guiding Question Every text tells a story from somewhere — there is no view from nowhere. How do you, as a critical reader, identify where a text speaks from, what it strategically chooses not to say, and what it stands to gain by showing you the world through that particular window?
🌍 Why This Matters In Paper 1, every unseen text carries a perspective — from the camera angle on a photograph to the diction of a speech to the narrative voice of a short-story extract. The guiding question will frequently ask how the text constructs its vision of the world. In Paper 2, tracing whose perspective is privileged and whose is silenced produces some of the most incisive comparative arguments you can make. Beyond the exam room, the skill of detecting framing and loaded language is one of the most valuable tools a reader can carry into twenty-first-century life — as the Oxford course companion observes, "meaning comes from complex interactions between text, audience and purpose," and understanding perspective is how you begin to audit those interactions.
1 · What Is Perspective? Untangling Three Layers
📖 Definition — Perspective Perspective is the vantage point from which a text is produced, narrated or experienced. In the IB course