IOC = Individual Oral Commentary

IOC - Basics The individual oral commentary (IOC) assesses your ability to analyse a passage from a text that you have read for Part 4. As the IBDP guide for language and literature states: “Students are required to engage in a critical examination of a particular extract draw from a work that has been studied in Part 4.”

IOC - Basics Here are some of IOC basics: The IOC is on a passage from a Part 4 work or poem. You have 20 minutes to prepare your IOC in a silent room. You analyse the passage for 10 minutes. Your teacher discusses your analysis of the passage with you for 2-5 minutes.

The IOC Passage A passage consists of no more than 40 lines. You do not know which passage you will receive. Each passage is accompanied by 2 guiding questions. Within your class there is an even distribution of passages from works (see table below.

IOC Rules The 20-minute preparation is in a silent room, under supervision. You may annotate the passage. You may not bring notes or texts to the exam. The IOC is recorded.

Internal Assessment (IA) The IOC is internally assessed for 15% of the final grade. SL and HL students are assessed according to the same assessment criteria. Sample recordings are sent to the IB. The IB may moderate your Internal Assessment (IA) marks (from both the IOC and the FOA).

Guidelines and guidance Before you perform your individual oral commentary, you will have 20 minutes to prepare your randomly selected passage. What do you do in these 20 minutes? You will want to have a strategy for formulating ideas and constructing your talk. While different strategies work for different people, there tend to be a few common phases for preparing a commentary. These three phases will be called ‘capture’, ‘filter’ and ‘construct’.

Guidance and guidelines

Be like a sponge when studying your IOC passage.

Guidance and guidelines Sample annotations of an IOC passage.

Guidance and guidelines Capture The first phase asks you to read the passage with no premonitions and an open mind. You want to be a sponge that absorbs the passage. Read it slowly with a few simple questions in mind, such as: What action takes place in the passage? Where does this passage appear in the work? Who are the main characters? What words strike you as interesting? How does this passage construct meaning? Why is this passage meaningful? If the passage itself could speak to you, what would it say? The goal in this stage is to be perceptive. Notice as much as possible and take time to read it carefully. In this phase you should annotate and underline the parts of passage that you strike you as interesting or noteworthy.

Guidance and guidlines Filter In this phase you start to make sense of your first impressions. Ask yourself: What patterns emerge from your annotations? Are there recurring words or themes? Can you cluster and connect words and phrases into common topics? Can you relate what you read to ideas discussed in class? This stage asks you to read your annotations from the ‘capture’ phase and find guiding principles or topics. You may relate parts of the passage back to classroom discussions or research on the text. You may have discussed how the literary work explores particular themes, uses certain narrative techniques or develops unique characters. In the passage you may find evidence of what you studied in class. The ‘filter’ phase asks you to both collect your observations and connect them to guiding concepts and ideas. Mind maps are good tools for the filter stage.

Guidance and guidelines Construct The individual oral commentary assess your ability to speak coherently and effectively about a passage from a literary work. You may have excellent ideas, but if they are not articulated accurately or organised well, then you will lose marks. Therefore you will want to plan your commentary, knowing the order in which you will deliver each idea and how you will express each idea. Ask yourself the following: What will be your guiding thesis? Which illustrations will you use from the text to support this thesis? In which order will you present these supporting ideas? How will you articulate certain key ideas? In this stage you will want to revisit any mind maps that you made in the 'filter' stage and reorganise your ideas into a chronological list.