It is essential to plan the ten minutes of the individual oral very carefully, and then to practise enough that it is well-prepared but not too much that it sounds scripted or rehearsed. But how best to plan the ten minutes? Below you'll find crucial advice for how to ensure you meet the demands of the assessment.
Bodies of Work
The need to concentrate on the bodies of work and not just the extracts is discussed in Individual Oral - Bodies of Work. A body of work is the collection of texts (by the same author) from which your extract has been taken. So you cannot simply discuss one advertisement or cartoon, for example, without considering the whole body of work studied by that author - is your example typical or atypical of that author's style or thematic message?
This is fairly easy to manage in novels or plays - in fact, keeping students talking about the extract and not the work as a whole was always the challenge in the old course when it was an Individual Oral Commentary. It is very natural to use the extract as a springboard to discuss the plot, characters and themes of the literary work as a whole. It is now more challenging with poetry, unless you have studied a particular poetry collection (Mean Time, by Carol Ann Duffy, 1993, for example). However, many of you will have been given a variety of poems by one author from different collections. For non-literary texts, though, it is essential that you consider the body of work and not just one text or extract in your Individual Oral.
Individual Oral Structure & Organisation
Structural ideas have been provided in Individual Oral - Structure Ideas and Individual Oral - Textual Commentary or Global Issue?, not to mention all of the suggestions about producing written (and thus spoken) analysis in Paper 1 - Structuring a Guided Textual Analysis, Paper 2 - Analysis and Evaluation and Paper 2 - Making Analytical Points.
However, given that the IB actually changed the Subject Guide nine months into the new course to ensure the prompt no longer referred to 'non-literary texts' and now said,
it should not be a surprise that they are marking students down who only discuss the extract and do not give appropriate balance to the other texts in the body of work.
With this in mind, here is a structural guide you can use to help you get the appropriate balance within the Individual Oral:
What do you think of this structural guide?
Practise using it, and then write an entry for your Learner Portfolio reflecting upon the relative merits of the structural guide. You can gain ideas on how to do this in The Learner Portfolio - Reflections.
How much of Individual Oral - Organising the 10 minutes have you understood?
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