Your school is probably giving you a mock individual oral, perhaps very soon in the summer term of IB1. This page will give you some guidance on the value of a mock IO, as well as some helpful tips on how to prepare.
What is a mock IO?
A mock Individual Oral examination is an interesting and challenging concept for the new assessment. There seems little point to me in spending all of the time preparing an entirely different set of works, extracts and global issues that you won't be using for the real thing. However, doing a mock on the same extracts and issue feels like getting two goes at a one-time assessment, which is certainly something the IB doesn't want to see.
For you, as students, you'll probably have to do whatever your teacher tells you to do. But you might get the opportunity to have some input in how it is done. After all, what is the value of a mock examination?
For me, it is purely so that the real thing holds no fear nor nasty surprises. Once you've done something once, the anxiety levels decrease massively. The other huge benefit is understanding time - in my experience, the first time students do the assessment they tend to speak for too little time (thinking they've been speaking too much!). The second time, it's too long. By the third go, a real understanding of the ten minutes and how they should be broken down starts to take shape.
I don't see any value in mock examinations as grades on report cards or anything else. Using it as helpful practice and a learning opportunity is key to success in the real thing.
All of that said, though, how can we stage a mock examination-style practice that is both useful but not requiring lots of preparation of texts that will not be used for the real thing?
Preparing mock texts
I would propose asking your teacher - or doing so yourself - to put together relatively random pairs of texts. It is better if these extracts come from your works or bodies of work studied, so you understand more broadly their ideas. Crucially, don't add a global issue - that's your job to do this, to identify an issue both explore and to articulate it. Then you would prepare and practise one of these pairs of texts and their wider works for the IO mock examination. This way, you get the full experience of the practice, but without essentially planning the IO twice with different works.
Example IO texts
Practice Individual Oral #1
Literary Work: Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (1993)
Non-literary Body of Work: Marabout, ‘Herge meets Hopper’
Away and See
Away and see an ocean suck at a boiled sun
and say to someone things I’d blush even to dream.
Slip off your dress in a high room over the harbour.
Write to me soon.
New fruits sing on the flipside of night in a market
of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby
stopping you dead, the peach in your palm respiring.
Taste it for me.
Away and see the things that words give a name to, the flight
of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words
wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.
Spell them with love.
Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end, hopeful.
Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,
horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the future.
Ask him his name.
Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see
for yourself. Walk. Take a boat till land reappears,
altered forever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on. G’on.
Away and see.
Practice Individual Oral #2
Literary Work: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Non-literary Body of Work: Bill Watterson, ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ cartoons
She was Rahel’s baby grand aunt, her grandfather’s younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn’t come to see her, though. Neither niece, nor baby grand aunt laboured under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. ‘Dizygotic’ doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha – Esthappen – was the older by eighteen minutes.
They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, worm-ridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual ‘Who is who?’ and ‘Which is which?’ from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox Bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem house for donations.
The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.
In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was For Ever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel had a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches – Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate – on the Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the small things.
Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They’d be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
Practice Individual Oral #3
Literary Work: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Non-literary Body of Work: IAMS, ‘I am not a Pet’ advertising campaign
No one would have thought nor did anyone say that Angela Vicario wasn’t a virgin. She hadn’t known any previous fiance and she’d grown up along with her sisters under the rigor of a mother of iron. Even when it was less than two months before she would be married, Pura Vicario wouldn’t let her go out alone with Bayardo San Roman to see the house where they were going to live, but she and the blind father accompanied her to watch over her honor. “The only thing I prayed to God for was the courage to kill myself,” Angela Vicario told me. “But he didn’t give it to me.” She was so disturbed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who helped her make cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions. “I obeyed them blindly,” she told me, “because they made me believe that they were experts in men’s tricks.” They assured her that almost all women lost their virginity in childhood accidents. They insisted that even the most difficult of husbands resigned themselves to anything as long as nobody knew about it. They convinced her, finally, that most men came to their wedding night so frightened that they were incapable of doing anything without the woman’s help, and at the moment of truth they couldn’t answer for their own acts. “The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet,” they told her. And they taught her own wives’ tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on the first morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house the linen sheet with the stain of honor.
She got married with that illusion. Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it even larger. He tried to hold off the wedding for a day when the bishop’s visit was announced so he could marry them, but Angela Vicario was against it. “Actually,” she told me, “the fact is I didn’t want to be blessed by a man who only cut off the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage.” Yet, even without the bishop’s blessing, the festival took on a force of its own so difficult to control that it got out of the hands of Bayardo San Roman himself and ended up being a public event.
How much of Individual Oral - To mock, or not to mock? have you understood?
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