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What’s Wrong With McDonalds?

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I was given this leaflet by a colleague many years ago, and I’ve always found it to be a great practice text. True, it’s unlikely that the texts selected for Paper 1 nowadays would be as dense as this leaflet. But that’s what makes it a good text for training. It’s impossible to cover all the points and methods used by the writers in a single sitting, so you have to make clear choices about what you are going to focus on analysing and the evidence you will include in your response.

Prose Study: No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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No Longer Human is the most famous of author Osamu Dezai’s (pen name of Shuji Tsushima, or 太宰治 in Japanese) few works. Written in 1948, it was first published in Japan under the name Disqualified From Being Human. Dezai’s book deals with themes of mental illness, depression, alienation, abuse, addiction, and suicide, seeming to uncover all of humanity’s darkest inclinations and tragedies.

Drama Study: Top Girls

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Mixing fantasy and reality, using a nonlinear construction, and featuring overlapping dialogue as women speak across, on top of, and around one another, Top Girls is both unique and difficult. Beginning with a surreal, imaginary dinner party scene that celebrates the promotion of Marlene to managing director of Top Girls Employment Agency, Churchill asks questions about what it takes for a woman to be successful, and to what extent 20th century Feminism has equaled out historical injustices for women.

A Call for Unity

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Last week would have been the 95th birthday of Reverend Martin Luthor King Jr which, this year, happily coincided with Martin Luthor King Day, always marked on the third Monday of January. As part of our course on rhetoric and persuasion, students worked with King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to improve their skills of analysis and hear those rhetorical techniques put into action by a master of his craft. Some 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, a young church pastor climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to describe his vision of America. More than 200,000 people – black and white – came to listen. While it’s highly unlikely you’ll get such a well-known and instantly recognisable speech as a text in Paper 1, that doesn’t stop you practicing with familiar words and phrases. So this is what we did…

An American Revolution

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Unseen Text: Chevrolet Volt Text Type: Print Advert Guiding Question: How do visual elements such as font, layout and image impact the reader of this advert? Paper 1 will consist of two texts: if you are a standard level candidate, you can choose which text you would like […]

Uniqlo Selfless Selfie

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This particular text and guiding question was set by the IB as a specimen paper when the Lang and Lit curriculum was revised in 2019, so it’s a good one to have a go at. It continues a long tradition of presenting advertisement texts for analysis in Paper 1. Ads are great multi-modal texts with strong visuals as well as plenty of persuasive copy and tricky linguistic devices for you to unpick…

Prose Study: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

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The debut collection of writer Yiyun Li (李翊雲 in Chinese), A Thousand Years of Good Prayer was published in 2005 and explores the lives, marriages, past loves, beliefs, and struggles of people caught between eastern and western cultures. From the hustle and bustle of Beijing, to the bleak and barren steppes of Inner Mongolia, to a tiny restaurant in Chicago, Yiyun Li’s stories take readers to places strange and familiar, comfortable and bewildering. Her characters are Chinese and Chinese Americans, immigrants and their families, all caught between countries and cultures, and having to adapt from communism to capitalism.

Magical Thinking

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Unseen Text: Gryphon by Charles Baxter Literary Genre: Prose Fiction Guiding Question: Comment on the interactions between the teacher and the children, and what these interactions imply about life and learning. The purpose of Language A: Literature Paper 1 is for you to write a Guided Literary Analysis […]

Prose Study: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

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Life of Pi is a survival story, religious parable, and coming-of-age tale rolled into one. Pi Patel is a curious teenager with a lifelong love for both animals and religion. In fact, he is intensely religious and practices the faiths of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity with equal zeal. When Pi is about 16 years old, his father decides to relocate his family to Canada to escape the increasingly fraught political situation of India in the 1970s. While transporting themselves and what remains of their Pondicherry Zoo on a cargo ship to Canada, the ship sinks in a storm. Brutally, Pi is instantly orphaned… and lost at sea alongside a crippled zebra, a hungry hyena, a gentle orangutan – and a fearsome Bengal tiger.

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

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Unseen Text: The Bat by Ruth Pitter Literary Genre: Poetry Guiding Question: Comment on the development of the speaker’s attitude towards the bat. You might recognise Ruth Pitter from your IGCSE studies; she wrote the poem Stormcock in Elder, about how an encounter with a little bird taught […]