Preview
IB DP English A: Language and Literature | SL & HL | Area 2: Time and Space | The Individual Oral: Text + Global Issue
📋 What You Will Learn
- State the IB rules governing length, source and type for both the literary and non-literary extracts submitted for the Individual Oral
- Apply the "sweet-spot" test to literary passages so your chosen extract is neither analytically thin nor impossibly dense within a five-minute spoken analysis
- Explain the body of work requirement for the non-literary extract and its "sense of authorship" condition, and list text types that qualify
- Use the three-stage selection procedure (literary work → global issue → non-literary extract) endorsed by Philpot's Cambridge course companion
- Evaluate any extract against the twin demands of representativeness (reflects the whole work's treatment of the GI) and analytical richness (dense in authorial choices)
- Identify the examiner traps that arise from poor extract choice and connect selection decisions directly to IO Criteria A and B
🔍 Guiding Question If two extracts from the same novel could each fit your global issue, why does it matter which one you choose — and how do you know when an extract is earning its place in your IO rather than simply filling its forty lines?
🌍 Why This Matters The Individual Oral counts for 30% of your final grade at SL and 20% at HL . Every mark across its four criteria — each worth up to 10 points, totalling /40 — is earned or lost in relation to the extracts you bring into the room. Examiners who reviewed a full season of IOs noted that the single most common weakness was choosing "extracts that only loosely fit the global issue" rather than ones with "rich importance" and dense stylistic choices (Course-Text IO Planning Guide, Examiner's Advice). Extract selection is, in practice, the first analytical act of your IO — long before you open your mouth.
1 · What the IO Asks of an Extract — Rules You Cannot Bend
Before choosing anything, you must understand the hard constraints the IB sets. As Brad Philpot's Cambridge course companion specifies, the literary extract must be up to 40 lines long and may be drawn from:
- a passage from a novel, play or short story
- a poem or an extract from a poem
- song lyrics or an extract from song lyrics
- a passage from prose non-fiction
A short poem that runs fewer than 40 lines does not need to be padded out; as Philpot notes, "short poems can be very dense, meaningful and ideal for the individual oral." The measure is analytical richness, not line count for its own sake.
For the non-literary extract , the Stancar and Pierce course companion ( English Language and Literature: Prepare for Success , Hodder 2021) defines it as "an extract from each of no