IB English A Literature Paper 1

Are you looking for some guidance regarding the structure of IB English A Literature Paper 1? In this post, we will provide a thorough breakdown of IB English A Literature Paper 1, ensuring you are familiar with the exam format and know what type of questions to expect to help you tackle the exam confidently. 

IB English A Literature Paper 1

• Paper 1 is a literary analysis paper, which is essentially a commentary based on either one or two literary texts, depending on whether the student is taking the course at Standard Level (SL) or Higher Level (HL).

   

• These texts are previously unseen, so Paper 1 tests students' ability to formulate coherent, well-structured arguments without prior preparation.

   

• In Paper 1, students will be given literature extracts (e.g. novels, short stories, plays, prose or poems) and need to write a literary commentary that explores how the writer’s literary choices shape meaning.

   

• At both SL and HL, students are provided with the same two literary extracts. However, SL students need to pick only one literary work and write a guided analysis based on it, while HL students need to analyze both literary works. It is important to note that HL students need to complete a separate analysis for each literary work.

   

• For SL, Paper 1 contributes 35% to the overall subject grade, while for HL, it accounts for 25%. 

   

• SL students can receive a maximum of 20 marks, while HL students can receive a maximum of 40 marks. 

   

• SL students have 1 hour and 15 minutes to complete Paper 1, while HL students have 2 hours and 15 minutes. 

   

• Students must use language, structure, and style to interpret the meaning of the provided literary texts. 

   

• Students must identify and explain how literary techniques such as imagery, symbolism, tone, perspective, rhythm, and structure contribute to how meaning is conveyed in the work.

Sample Extract and Question

In the following extract from a travelogue, the author has travelled out of the city of Cairo and into the desert.

 

It was a canyon of great promise. The cliffs were three hundred or more feet high and rose in a concave curve to an abrupt crumbly steepness at the top. They looked impossible to climb. I was cowed by the canyon’s vastness, content at first to leap from boulder to boulder along its rocky bottom. There were plants but no trees, gravel slides, rounded hillocks of shale and side wadis* winding into rocky clefts in the canyon walls. The air was brilliantly clear. Bright blue sky in front and, when I turned to look back, the city squatting under a foggy haze. You could actually see the start of the smog, worryingly near the place where my kids’ school was, but as I walked up the canyon I turned my back on it.

 

In the ultra-clear air of the desert you can see as far as you want to. Small details are visible far away. A falcon floating in the distance above the canyon top was like an inkstroke, a precise piece of calligraphy.

 

There were two ruined blockhouses in the wadi, remnants of its time as a military training area. These became my landmarks. I would reach them quickly and decide where to explore. On the ground I found fossils but no stone tools. I followed a path up a rocky defile and rediscovered the pleasure of hauling myself up short boulder-faces. Each sub-wadi was a series of steps that water had once poured down. They looked unclimbable but up close there was almost always a way. Under the cliffs were animal tracks and burrows but for days I saw no animals, only birds including the black and white wheatear, the zerzur, after which Zerzura had been named. At the top of the side wadi I was on the plain, flat and gravelly. In the far distance were new tower blocks being built. Ahead it was clear to the horizon and behind, in the hollow of the Nile valley, lay Cairo under its pall of greyness.

 

I had been keen on rock-climbing when I was younger, but it had been years since I had done any. I was surprised to find I’d become trepidatious about heights, nervous about scrambling up shale cliffs. Slowly, I regained the old skills needed, not pausing too long on a hand- or foothold, not thinking too much, just moving upwards. Instead of seeing unclimbable vertiginous cliffs I began to see routes, ways up and out of the canyon. I deliberately sighted up a possible route and found my way quite easily to the very top edge. The drop made me keep clear of the edge, gave my knees a slight wobble. Looking across the canyon, which was maybe a half-kilometre wide, the plains on the other side stretched away to hills marked only by a distant radio tower. Coming down the same way I saw my first desert fox, not a big-eared fennec, but a red fox. I sat still and watched it as it watched me. The time spent watching in the cool, clear high-up air was like an inner breath of some neglected part of me, which neutralized the heavy sense of self, made me transparent again. 

 

Robert Twigger, Lost Oasis: In Search of Paradise (2007)