In preparing for the Individual Oral, not only is the choice of the texts to compare crucial, but also the way you frame the deconstruction of these texts around the global issue of choice is key. The other challenge, always, is how well should you be prepared and should you have your "script" in mind?
How much is too much?
A student from a different class in my school wrote to me recently, asking me to look over his notes and subsequent feedback from the practice oral (on different texts) he'd done the previous week. His teacher had given him a tentative mark of 29/40 - a very good mark - but he felt his work merited more.
In this message to me, the student asked 'whether in these two paragraphs the analyses of the advertisement and the poem were well done'? My response, naturally, was that I was concerned that it sounded like he had written a script which is neither allowed, nor good practice. The regulations as outlined in the Subject Guide state:
Schools will be provided with a form for students to create an outline of their oral. Students should prepare this in advance as it will provide them with a springboard for their oral. Students should not read the outline as a prepared script. The form gives students a maximum of 10 bullet points to help provide structure to their oral. Individual bullet points must not be excessively long. (p.56)
Beyond this, a really engaging and supportive back-and-forth between me and the student did lead to a development of the sort of thinking as outlined in Paper 2 - Analysis and Evaluation. But an oral is still not going to score well if it is scripted.
Focus of oral
All of that said, given the challenges of how to focus on the global issue, while at the same time discussing the whole literaty work or non-literary body of work sufficiently, as well as exemplifying that through the extracts and giving enough insight into not only thr content but also the form of the work and body of work, it's clear that students have a lot to do and not much time to do it in.
Firstly, always keep the structural guide for the ten minutes in mind, presented in Individual Oral - Organising the 10 minutes. If you keep in the forefront that you only have two minutes each to speak about the literary work, the literary extract, the non-literary body of work, and the non-literary extract, then it should allow you to keep it tight and focused.
I have five top tips for you. See if you can guess what they are, and then check them off and see how you've done below:
How much of Individual Oral - Preparation have you understood?
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